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Ever feel like every day is another challenge to be overcome? Not in that “it’s a new adventure today!” feeling, but more of a “what awful thing is going to happen today?” sorta way. I imagine that PCs must feel that way a lot, and if so then the endless parade of monsters probably has quite a bit to do with it. Sometimes it must seem like there’s a new monster every day. Speaking of which…

Creature Monthly is the aptly-named monthly compendium of creatures from the Creature Daily website, which delivers a new monster for your Pathfinder game every weekday. This first compilation presents the monsters for April, 2012. Let’s flip through the pages and see what creatures lie in store.

This product comes with two different PDF files, one called April12CDweb and another called April12CDpdf. I’m not sure what the technical difference between the two is, but there’s clearly some sort of difference, because my computer can view the former file smoothly, but the latter one has persistent viewing problems. To be more specific, whenever I try to look through the “April12CDpdf” file, my Acrobat Reader X (on Windows XP Home, if that helps) informs me that it’s having a problem viewing the file (error code 40), and refuses to display the artwork – the text comes through just fine, it’s only the artwork that refuses to display.

Of course, it’s something of a moot point, though a disturbing one, as the April12CDweb file displays just fine. From what I can make out, the two files are meant to be identical in terms of their visual presentation, so there’s no loss of content for the error. Hence, the rest of this review will deal exclusively with what’s in the “…web” file.

The April ’12 Creature Monthly is a forty-seven page PDF that contains exactly twenty monsters, something that always seemed slightly off to me, as there were twenty-one weekdays in April. I know that one missing monster is a small thing, but I can’t help but wonder what happened to the twenty-first creature.

Unfortunately, the book irked me from the get-go, as it lacked the ease-of-navigation tools I’ve come to expect both for PDF files and for bestiaries. To be clear, the book does have a table of contents, listing each monster alphabetically by name. That’s it. No hyperlinks in the table of contents, no bookmarks, no index of monsters by CR or creature type or even terrain. The only way to get an overview of what’s here is to read through the entire book and use the table of contents as a refresher. Hopefully future months will be more forthcoming with the GM aids.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the artwork here, however. Each monster has a full color illustration, and the quality for the picture if exceptionally high. In each case the picture fairly leaps off the page, and will definitely wow your players. Given that the book it set on a light grey background, with borders of darker grey and slight whorl patterns on them, the presentation element of the book is strong. It’s so strong, however, that the lack of a printer-friendly version is notable in its absence. Likewise, size-specific counters to represent the creatures on the battlemat aren’t to be found either.

But after all of these technical issues, what about the monsters themselves, you ask?

The twenty monsters to be found here run a range of CRs, from ½ to 16, and surprisingly there’s an underlying theme to the monsters here – the majority of them are from a cold environment. Now, there are plenty of monsters for whom that’s not so, but a significant number of them are monsters with a wintery theme.

I should mention that most of these monsters could have stood to go a few more rounds of editing. In reading over what’s here, I found creatures with typographical errors (e.g. an opening parenthesis one space too soon for the Blood Shadow’s Ability Focus feat), stylistic errors (the storm angel is a Chaotic Neutral creature with the angel subtype, for instance, or how the Storm Wraith has the electricity subtype…which doesn’t exist), and errors in stat blocks (e.g. the Storm Wraith’s AC bonuses are +1 dodge, +4 deflection, and +7 Dex, giving it an AC of…24? What?). Little errors like these peppered the vast majority of the monsters here, and that’s just on a casual inspection.

Overall, this is a monster book with good intentions but flawed execution. The monsters here are, for the most part, very good in terms of their underlying idea, and in how they want to stat those ideas up. It’s a host of technical problems, from the PDF format to the stat blocks themselves that are holding the book back. Hopefully, these will be a learning experience for the publisher, and next month’s creatures will be easier to use to terrify your players.

It’s difficult to say just what the draw is of playing evil characters. There’s an ineffable quality to being the bad guy, a sense that, if evil is something that tempts people to fall, then those who have fallen have no further moral failings that can be used against them. All that’s left is to make use of the certitude that comes from damnation and bring ruin to the champions of light. It’s in that spirit that we look at the third adventure in the Way of the Wicked adventure path: Tears of the Blessed.

Tears of the Blessed comes as two PDF files – the main file and a printer-friendly version thereof. The latter’s differences from the main file being that it removes the page backgrounds as well as the coloration from the page borders. Unfortunately, that’s not enough for me to give this particular area a pass, as it retains the full color interior illustrations (and even the page borders are kept in line-scale). True printer-friendly material removes all of the interior artwork, even though that means doing the layout again.

That said, the main file presents itself quite well. Bookmarks are present at each major section of the book, though save for one part there were no nested sub-section bookmarks (though the last bookmark took me to the front of the book). Copy and paste was fully enabled, which is always good. I do have to give props to Michael Clarke for keeping the high quality of the art coming. All of the pieces here are full-color, and while I wouldn’t put this at the highest tier of RPG art, what’s here is damn good (devil pun!).

I’m also going to cover up-front that there were some errors in this book. Nothing was major, but small problems crept in. I noticed several typos, several of which a quick spell-check could have caught. Likewise, the odd stat block error is present also, though never so much as to make a creature unusable (no aasimar, for example, has the humanoid type).

Tears of the Blessed follows hot on the heels of the previous adventure, Call Forth Darkness. It’s in this adventure, ironically enough, that we get stats for the magical disease which was the prize of the prior installment in the adventure path. Following achieving this, the PCs are immediately whisked off to the port city of Ghastenhall, settling in for a month to cool their heels before getting started on their next assignment…to raise an army and assault the faith of Mitra’s holiest temple!

I initially had mixed feelings about this section of the adventure, as it seemed like something of a carbon copy of how the previous adventure progressed. As in Call Forth Darkness, the first part of the adventure is a fairly short presentation on the town that the PCs are setting up in before going off and performing their real assignment. However, I quickly remembered that, although this portion of the adventure is short and somewhat underdeveloped, it’s still promising in what it offers, though as with Farholde this is because the gazetteer at the end really helps to make the town come alive.

Part of the reason why Ghastenhall feels so short is that its presented largely as potential adventuring opportunities, which make it feel almost like a series of side-quests waiting to happen – depending on how you present them, and how much your PCs invest in the town, there can be a lot to do here, or it can be quickly bypassed.

The second “act” of the adventure is concerned with the actual formation of the army of evil. As with the section on Ghastenhall, this is one core scenario around which more can be done if the PCs want to go out of their way. After an initial meeting with Sakkarot Fire-Axe in which he lends your PCs a few hundred bugbears to command, there are also several other avenues to explore. Most of these are to find new individuals to fight by the PCs’ sides, but a few do present possibilities for enlarging their overall force. Helpfully, the author does make mention of the PCs existing forces (e.g. Grumblejack the ogre, from the first adventure, or their custom-built evil organization from the second) and how they can play into the overall force.

This section also includes some very cogent advice on what to do if the PCs start to balk at being ordered around. This is wise, as by this point the PCs will likely start to chafe at having to do someone else’s bidding. Of course, this ultimately comes down to various ways to snap them back into line, but it’s good that the author anticipated something like this.

The third act of the book is the initial assault on the valley of Mitra’s holiest temple. This part of the book was interesting for the various tactical possibilities it presents the PCs – up until now, the adventures have lacked a certain degree of freedom in what the PCs could do; what latitude they had was presented in terms of operational discretion…that’s the case here, but the amount of discretion has grown quite a bit.

The Vale of Valtaerna is the valley in which Mitra’s holiest temple is guarded. This is no building constructed in a crevasse either. The entrance to the valley has a watch-tower built into it, and down in the valley is a lakeside small town, a mountain-temple, and finally the cathedral itself. The PCs attack is set to take place at the beginning of winter, when deep snows cut the valley off from the outside world for three months. For those three months, when communication is cut off and reinforcements are near-impossible, the PCs have to conquer the valley and slaughter every single living thing there.

That’s where the operational freedom comes in. This section gives a detailed overview of the watchtower itself, and follows it up with the ensuing battle as the PCs’ army fights its way past various defensive points to finally conquer the defenders. Needless to say, there are various things that the PCs can do in their initial assault what will greatly affect how the initial siege goes, which in turn affects the flow of the rest of the battle.

The author says that this section should keep up the pressure on the PCs, as the entire battle takes place in one night. That means that the PCs need to conquer the watchtower and then fight their way through encounter after encounter. Forget about the fifteen-minute adventuring day here! Be prepared to go through over a half-dozen encounters, and be warned that you can’t just send your army in for these – the battle takes the format of specific encounters that the PCs need to face in the midst of the chaos of battle. Various actions allow the PCs to acquire or lose Victory Points (making a return from the first adventure), with their point total determining the end result of the battle.

With the defenders crushed and the small town now firmly in their grasp, the book’s fourth act deals with everything else in the valley, save for the cathedral. It’s here that the book takes a decidedly darker turn as you immediately need to deal with what to do with the survivors…the elderly, the women, and the children (remember, your assignment is to kill everything). This part is something of a delicate balancing act, as the bugbear commanders have some suggestions about what to do with the prisoners (all of which are awful). In accordance with the advice in the first adventure, this book assumes that one of the bugbears commanders “deals” with the survivors, though your group can step in (for better or for worse) if they wish.

This section allows for three months of time in which to root out the remaining holy areas, and it’s important to note that the book doesn’t presume that it’s entirely quiet during that time. There is one event that does happen here, but after the initial scenes of setting up and dealing with the prisoners, it’s the only one. I do wish that the book had seen fit to give us further events.

The major parts of act four, however, deal with the mountain temple, and the garden in front of the cathedral. These are comparatively short encounters, having about ten areas between them both. They’re still fairly challenging, and aren’t optional (nor can you send your army to these places, as they require competence) – to permanently extinguish Mitra’s light, you must destroy the heart of each holy locale.

With the first two down, it’s the cathedral that holds the last of the religion’s heart. It should be noted that there have been plenty of good-aligned monsters in the adventure prior to this. Lammasus, blink dogs, kirin, all the monsters from the bestiaries that you never usually get to fight. The big one, however, is celestials. There are plenty of celestials throughout the adventure, and that doesn’t change here. Once the PCs manage to overcome the potent holy defenses and slay the cathedral’s final defenders, they can extinguish the central pillar of Mitra’s religion…just in time for the plague they received from the previous adventure to hit the nation’s populace hard.

Following the adventure, the book presents a gazetteer of Ghastenhall. I honestly expected to be bored by this, but was pleasantly surprised by just how alive the city felt. A port town, Ghastenhall is naturally not quite the bastion of righteousness that you’d expect for a country that has a single, Lawful Good religion. Moreover, the city’s history and colorful neighborhoods give it a distinctive quality that is not only likely to fire your creativity for what can be done here, but presents itself perfectly for your evil PCs as well.

The last section of the book gives us an long-overdue overview of your enemy religion: that of Mitra, the Lord of Light. This section surprised me, as I was expecting something more akin to Paizo’s style of deity write-ups; that wasn’t this. First, Mitra is a triune deity, having three simultaneous aspects – this gives him three deity entries, which presents an interesting set of options for those who worship him.

This section also doesn’t deal much with Mitra as an individual. There’s nothing here about what Mitra’s divine exploits, or how he feels about other gods. Instead, the section largely discusses his religion, specifically as it appears in Talingarde (since Mitra has no universal church, something I found odd for a primarily Lawful deity). There was some important information here, such as how spellcasters in Talingarde are comparatively rare – the head of the church, for example, can’t cast divine spells. This is an inversion of the usual assumptions in a Pathfinder game, and is likely something a GM should know when setting the stage for the beginning of this adventure path.

Overall, Tears of the Blessed represents a turning point in the Way of the Wicked. While before, the PCs were operating in secrecy just to survive, and having to defend themselves against those who’d do them harm, here they get to be the ones doing harm to others. In this book, the PCs take the offensive against the light, and get to snuff out the heart of it. There are some problems with the finer points of the product, but these are easily dealt with, and the overall adventure is one which will likely be extremely satisfying to your players. Never has causing so much sorrow been so much fun as it is in Tears of the Blessed.

Some Game Masters take great pleasure in writing their own adventures; for them, it’s a joy, something they throw themselves into eagerly. Personally, I don’t know how they do it, as I’m always strapped for adventures. Given the sheer amount of work that goes into crafting an adventure, structuring the plot, making maps, constructing stat blocks, it seems like a truckload of work. Hence, I’m always on the lookout for a reliable source of adventures. Sometimes Adventure Paths are good, but other times I want stand-alone adventures that can be used as-is in my game, without worrying about how it plays if removed from a larger context.

Rite Publishing’s new periodical, Adventure Quarterly, seems right up that alley. Let’s take a closer look at the first issue and see what it’s like.

Adventure Quarterly #1 is a weighty affair. Not only is the main magazine just over seventy-five pages in length, but the main PDF file is accompanies by a series of separate map files. These color map files are a combination of JPGs and PNGs of the various maps, in various configurations, such as the maps and keys together, and the maps separately and the keys separately. The quality of these cannot be understated – the files are high resolution, and you can zoom in to a great degree on them. Altogether, the maps are a whopping two hundred megabytes!

The PDF of the magazine is similarly high-quality in its presentation. It has full copy and paste enabled, and full nested bookmarks are to be found. Unfortunately, there’s no printer-friendly version, though there is a printed copy available if you need this on paper. The interior artwork ranges in styles, from detailed black and white to a “washed out”-style full color. None of the pieces were particularly bad, and several of them were quite arresting.

Every publication goes through a few growing pains at first, and right away I noticed one for Adventure Quarterly: the table of contents, while it lists the adventures and their authors, doesn’t list the level it’s intended for. When you look at these adventures, there’s no way to tell whether they’re meant for 1st-level or 20th-level PCs. This alone wouldn’t be so bad, but this information is also not to be found in the adventures themselves. I consider this to be fairly critical information, and so marked off points for this.

The adventures themselves are three in number. The first one, “Too Many Cooks,” appears to be for first-level characters. Set in the city Somnal, for which a full city stat block is helpfully included, this deals with the problem of several chefs suddenly going missing. The author writes that this adventure will likely overwhelm PCs if they go from one encounter to the next in rapid order, and suggests that these scenarios can be broken up across a longer period, and even intermixed with another adventure if you remove the time pressure, something that I felt was good advice.

Structure-wise, Too Many Cooks is something of a mystery adventure, as the PCs are meant to follow a trail of clues from one encounter to the next, until they’re ultimately led to the culprit behind the disappearances. I had some initial misgivings about how this would work, as mysteries have their own problems. The adventure’s answer to this is two-fold – each of the encounters starts with combat, after which there’s a clue that is, in all honesty, too obvious to be missed. That may be a slight overstatement, but the clues are not that difficult to find, and are fairly obvious in where they point. There are still places where things could go off the rails, of course, but the adventure is not so subtle in its workings that getting things back on track would be hard.

I have to mention the final encounter for the adventure, which takes place in a kitchen. Author Adam Diagle did a great job here of playing up the unorthodox nature of how a kitchen can contribute to a battlefield. Between the villain having the feats necessary to use all sorts of improvised weaponry (and a helpful chart of what improvised weapons are available and what their damage is), your PCs will have to deal with everything from being attacked with hot skillets to exploding boilers and vicious meat grinders! I can easily say that this adventure was the highlight of the magazine.

The second adventure, unfortunately, was its polar opposite in terms of quality. “The Book of Promises” is an adventure that wants to be many different things, and in trying to achieve them all ends up completing very few of them.

The premise of the Book of Promises is that a werejackal cult of Asmodeus is trying to make people sign away their souls to the Devil God, which is done in the eponymous Book of Promises. To this end, they’ve created a natural disaster, a flood, in the town of Vestage, so that they can try force people to sign in exchange for being saved from the floodwaters. Rather oddly, the Book is stored in a place in town called the Counter’s Depository, which acts as a private bank – people pay to have them store their valuables. With the Depository also flooded by the town, several of its customers are planning to “steal” back their valuables from the location, and want the PCs to do it for them…which also puts them in position to find the Book of Promises.

The scenario, needless to say, has problems right from the outset. Why would the Asmodean werejackal cult (which sounds like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon) create a flood that would also hit the place where they keep their artifact? Why do the people who have their valuables stored in the Depository feel the need to have them stolen back instead of just going there and retrieving them normally?

It unfortunately doesn’t get any better. The adventure is much too fond of saying that certain effects just happen, giving little specification. When going to the meeting for the thieving job, for example, there’s a magic effect that detects all weapons on the PCs. What is this effect? I don’t know…there’s nothing that says. We don’t know what it is or how to beat it, save for the text saying gloves of storing will work. Similarly, the Depository has magic on it that only allows its customers, or their representatives, inside…something that seems forgotten when we have hags, doppelgangers, and other adventurers in it later. Note that characters that aren’t intended to be fought, such as the PCs competitors for the job and the other adventuring party inside, don’t have a stat block either, which I consider to be somewhat poor, since you never know how your PCs will cause things to go down.

The last adventure, which sadly has its first paragraph as the last paragraph of the previous adventure, is The Soul Siphon. Unlike the previous adventure, The Soul Siphon is fairly well constructed, but comes with some baggage. For one thing, it’s a psionic adventure – now, I personally enjoy psionics quite a bit, but I know there are plenty of Pathfinder gamers for whom that’s a deal-breaker (oddly, the author notes that this uses 3.5 OGL psionics…but from what I saw, the characters seem to use the Psionics Unbound rules). Moreover, the adventure, which is meant for 12th-level characters, comes with four pre-generated characters, and the initial adventure hook is built around those pre-existing ties. That’s just bad design, to me, as it essentially argues that the players shouldn’t have their own characters going into this, which most will. On the other hand, this is perfect if you want to make it as a psionic one-shot.

The Soul Siphon’s premise is that a tyrannical ruler, who lives in a tower that’s slowly sinking into a bog, is terrorizing the local populace, punishing them for a lone dissenter in their ranks. The PCs meet this dissenter (who is connected to one of them via their back-story), and give them the keys to enter a sunken level of the tower, wherein they can fight their way up and confront not only the tyrant, but also locate the artifact that has gifted him with apparent immortality, and put and end to both.

The adventure is fairly well-constructed, and seems to presume that the PCs will level up over the course of it. Two appendices provide both a new monster, and the four pregen PCs.

Following the final adventure, two short articles are given. The first, by Raging Swan Press mastermind Creighton Broadhurst, is a short set of tables to determine the name of a tribe. The article basically uses a series of combinations from different tables to come up with a colorful moniker (though a quick table at the beginning is available if you want to restrict things to one roll). Following this is an overview of the werejackal cult of Asmodeus, giving their structure, base of operations, allies and enemies, and other general information about them. As its own thing, this wasn’t bad, though I do wish that Paizo’s organization rules had been imported here. Still, the group does make a passable, if somewhat odd, villainous organization.

Overall, the first issue of Adventure Quarterly hits a few bumps in the road, but does show promise. The level listing for adventures is something that absolutely has to be fixed for the second issue, as at-a-glance information about what sort of PCs each adventure is intended for is an absolute must. Beyond that, the first adventure is clearly the cream of the crop, providing a fun little “mystery-lite” for low-level PCs. The second adventure, however, is as much a mess as the flooded town it takes place in, and a Game Master will likely need to give it a polish to make it workable as-is. The last adventure is good but carries several caveats for prospective GMs – if you take it as a trial run for psionics, it’s not bad, but if you want it to be more than a one-shot, or hate psionics, be prepared to start changing things.

Given that what’s good here outnumbers that which isn’t, my overall score for the debut issue of Adventure Quarterly is 3.5 stars, but I’m rounding it up to four since even the bad material can be saved or altered with a little elbow grease. What’s here is three-quarters good, and that’s not bad for the first Adventure Quarterly.

Sometimes the most defining characteristic of a hero, or villain, isn’t their strengths, but their weaknesses. In Pathfinder, however, that’s not something easily modeled under the rules – while there are plenty of ways to showcase a character’s areas of expertise, mainly through feats and class powers, there are few methods for mechanically portraying a character’s poorer abilities.

4 Winds Fantasy Gaming fixes that by making your characters worse with Player’s Option: Flaws.

Flaws is a short book, having less than a dozen pages. Despite this, it has full bookmarks, and the copy-and-paste is enabled. The book’s visual presentation is minimalistic in tone, having no page borders and only two black and white interior illustrations.

Flaws opens with a brief discussion about giving your characters the flaws assigned here. While some of this seems boilerplate, with such caveats as characters normally only being allowed to take two flaws, and only at character creation, there are a few twists here from what you’re expecting. For example, while one flaw can grant a feat, the second one grants exactly three skill points. It’s interesting that this particular route was chosen, in what I can only assume was the idea that granting two feats was too much.

A bigger surprise is the idea that flaws can be bought off – and this doesn’t mean simply giving up a corresponding feat or skill points. Rather, each flaw has a certain, specific manner in which its penalty can be permanently negated, while you get to keep the corresponding feat or skill points. It’s an intriguing idea, and lends much more credence to why the system doesn’t let you get more than one feat, since you can effectively end up with something for nothing once the flaw is bought off. These buy-offs tend to have a minimum level that they can occur at, however, so you do have to spend at least some time dealing with the flaw itself.

Almost fifty flaws are given, each of which is formatted in a manner similar to a feat in terms of presentation style. I do wish that a summary table had been presented so that the flaws could have been looked over at a glance, however. The flaws run the gamut from physical problems with your character (e.g. Flatulent) to mental problems (e.g. Foul-Mouthed) to social issues (e.g. Excommunicated). While some of these present problems as mild as skill penalties, others can have profound role-playing consequences. Similarly, for most of them, lifting the flaw is fairly simple: If you want to stop being Miserly, for example, just spend more than 1,000 gp on a single purchase. Others are harder, however, and being a Wanted Fugitive will require you to find the right person and succeed on a tough skill check and cost you some money.

Overall, I found Player’s Option: Flaws to present a good range of possibilities for what it offers your characters. The selection of flaws is wide, and what you get for them is good without being overpowering. The method of buying the flaws off is also innovative, though I’m slightly wary of how it results in an overall net gain for characters. Between that and the need for a summary table, this is an altogether 4.5-star product, but I’m rounding it up to 5-stars overall. Some minor issues don’t detract from these Flaws.

There’s an irony in the fact that the cleric, as a class, relies very little on religious devotion. If you’ve ever made a joke about clerics with no ranks in Knowledge (religion), you’re aware of the all-too-appropriate label of them being just another kind of wizard; after all, there’s no way to build faith into the class mechanics, right?

Enter Necromancer Games’ Necromancer’s Grimoire: The Book of Faith.

From a technical perspective, the Book of Faith isn’t bad. Just over three dozen pages long, it has full nested bookmarks, which is a plus. However, there’s no way to copy and paste the file (or the printer-friendly file), which is a bit of a drag. I do give it props for having a printer-friendly file, which eliminates the background and one page of ads at the end, but unfortunately it not only retains all of the interior illustrations, but still has them in color as well – if you have to leave the pictures in a printer-friendly file, you should at least make them grayscale.

It’s worth mentioning that the artwork is all of a single type here, being pictures of stained glass windows. As those are universal symbols of churches, it’s a pretty good fit for the book, though some other kind of imagery would have helped as well. The pages themselves are set on a tan background, so as to look more like actual pages from a tome.

After some opening fiction and a quick foreword, we’re taken straight into the book’s main offering – the priest, a new base class. Initially, the priest looks something like a divine wizard, having the lowest BAB and Hit Die progression, as well as being proficient with very few weapons and no armor. Things get more interesting, however, when you look at the priest’s spellcasting ability.

Unlike normal slot-based spellcasters, the priest has something called favor (points). Each day, they can choose a number of spells from the cleric spell list to ready – the readied list of spells then becomes roughly the equivalent of a sorcerer’s spells known list. A readied spell can be cast over and over…but each casting has a point cost in terms of favor, and once their favor is gone, the priest cannot cast anything else until they rest and regain their favor again.

There’s more to the class than this, of course. As the priest levels up it gains the ability to intrinsically know what will and will not please their god, gains the ability to work miracles, cast spells not readied (for greater favor cost), hold confessions, and more. The class is very tightly focused, and its class features serve to give it a much more religiously-minded bent than the “casting, channeling, and bashing” cleric.

While I think that would have been enough, the class then gets an expansive flavor section of flavor text, talking about things such as what’s known about priests on a knowledge check, how they get along with other classes and organizations, and a lot more. While I thought this was good, I wish at least some portion of this had devoted more space to expanded mechanical options – the lack of any archetypes or favored class options were noticeable in their absence.

It’s after this that we come to a section on measuring favor and piety. Like favor, piety is a new point-based system for the priest. Whereas favor is gained routinely and the amount of it rapidly swells by level, piety is gained much more rarely. The section here discusses how piety points are gained, and doing so is no small feat – basically, you need to make a positive advancement in your religion in order to gain piety. This isn’t something you can write off either, as piety has game mechanical effects; for example, you get bonus favor per day if you have a high piety score. There’s more that it effects, as several of the priest’s class features deal with piety as well.

Favor is also covered. While favor is gained as part of the status quo, a priest can gain (or lose) favor depending on how they act, with the threshold here generally being a bit lower than for piety. This is quite different than for most spellcasting classes, as being devout can have immediate impact (gaining favor) on your combat efficacy (using the gained favor to cast spells). A table summarizes how much favor is what degree of a reward at what level.

The book’s third section covers miracles – miracles are a class ability of the priest (categorized as spell-like, which I think was a mistake; I didn’t see anything about their effective spell level, for instance, and I don’t like the idea of these being subject to dispel magic) that are similar to spellcasting. Only so many miracles can be known at once, and they have some fairly strongest costs to use.

The major difference between miracles and spells is that the former are often very large in their area of effect (though the exact area tends to depend on the priest’s piety). A priest with a high piety score, for example, can use the Affect Crops miracle in a five-mile radius. Most miracles tend to have a correspondingly high duration as well. Of course, with a high casting time and a prohibition on how often they can be used, virtually none of the listed miracles (just under twenty) are useful in combat.

The last part of the book introduces the devoted apostle prestige class, which I found myself not caring for too much. The problem here is that this class has, as part of its prerequisites, that you have some piety already, so on the surface only priests can take this prestige class. At the same time, however, it increases your caster level, but not your favor per level, which means that a priest’s spellcasting ability takes a hit. The prestige class has several functions that are based around piety, both gaining it have having certain thresholds of it activate class abilities, so I’m inclined to think that it’s meant for multiclass priests (as it has a cleric’s BAB and Hit Dice), but I’m less than certain. It does have a nice flavor text section, however.

Overall, the Book of Faith does a fairly good job of presenting a new sort of character that has a closer tie to their religion than the existing divine spellcasting classes. While it requires a greater sense of their in-game religion, and requires the GM to play an active role as their god (in terms of awarding piety and favor), the priest much more easily fills the role of a character with a close relationship with their god, which has a direct impact on how well they can tend to their community. It’s unfortunate that the prestige class doesn’t do quite as good a job at finding its niche, but even then it’s not a total write-off. Altogether, this is a book that provides some concrete facts towards finding faith in your game.

It’s easy to overlook the importance of money in Pathfinder. While many quests are centered around lofty ideals of saving worlds and defeating evil, the immediate focus of typical sessions tends to revolve around acquisition, usually right after having killed the monstrous former owners. Indeed, some creatures may establish a fortune of wealth so vast that they have other creatures specifically to guard it. In the Tarnished Souk, the Khan of Nightmares has such a creature overlooking his own vast finances: Gobseck Vaultwright, Meister of the Golden Anvil.

A seventeen-page book, this product hits most of the technical benchmarks we’ve come to expect from quality PDFs. Full nested bookmarks are present, and cop-and-paste is enabled. Ornate borders are on all sides of every page, and several black and white illustrations break up the text every few pages or so. I do wonder if there should be a printer-friendly version, as the heavy borders combined with the periodic artwork may be tougher for some printers, but in a PDF this short it’s probably not a huge deal.

Gobseck is, as a character, perhaps best characterized as Ebenezer Scrooge before he met the three ghosts – that is, he’s a cold and heartless money-grubber who has a romantic tragedy in his past. The nature of this tragedy, or more aptly, the identity of the woman in question, is never revealed, though a sidebar on using Gobseck in your campaign does include some pointers on who she should be in a Coliseum Morpheuon campaign. As with other characters from the Faces of the Tarnished Souk, Gobseck’s stat block is an impressive collection of first- and third-party content. While some of his levels use a fighter archetype from Ultimate Combat, the majority of them are magister levels, from the Super Genius Guide of the same name (though take note, those with older files may remember it as the Genius Guide to the Magus instead).

Several of Gobseck’s feats are reprinted here for ease of reference, even those that can be found in the PFSRD already, which I found helpful. A pair of spells from Rite’s own 1001 Spells book are given next before we move into a number of magic weapon and armor abilities – these are quickly put into context as we then get Gobseck’s individual magic items broken down, and I have to say, he’s as equipped as a CR 20 encounter should be! His hammer, in particular, is not something you want to be on the receiving end of.

Gobseck’s vault is statted up next – not just a thing, it’s actually a living vault, albeit a unique one. Not only does it have powers unlike other living vaults, it’s also a monstrously powerful thing, weighing in at CR 33! I actually snickered at the listing for its XP rating, as I strongly suspect very few groups will ever be able to earn experience points for destroying it.

Slightly oddly, two quick variants are then given for Gobseck – specifically, there are two sections listing what changes should be made to his stat block if you add the Divine or Exemplar templates to him. I wish there had been more context to why these were here – are these versions of Gobseck from parallel universes? Things that could happen to him in the future? Just dumping alternate materials on us without talking about what they mean in the game gives us numbers, not a character.

This is a lesson driven home in the two alternate stat blocks for Gobseck that follow, lowering his power down to CR 13, and CR 6. His title changes with each stat block, which I take to mean that these represent Gobseck at earlier stages in his life (ironically, each also has a note on what to change if those templates are used with him).

The book closes with four templates presented – these are the two templates that Gobseck does have (Smoke and Element-Infused, with him having the air version of the latter), and the two that he could potentially have. Oddly, there’s a small section (two or three paragraphs) of “bonus content” that talk about the one sentimental item that Gobseck keeps in his vault. I did like this bonus bit of exposition, but I found that it actually highlighted what would have been a far better bonus – a listing of what’s to be found in the Vault; while this will obviously vary between campaigns, even a guideline of what sort of fortune of treasures and magic is to be found in the vault would have been useful – I consider it a missed opportunity.

Overall, however, the book is still a good one, and like all of the Faces of the Tarnished Souk, it’s a case-study in how to use OGL materials to great effect. While the aspect of character development is somewhat overshadowed by the game mechanics here, that’s the natural consequence of (rightly) including the reused material for reference purposes. The result is that you have a very strong character with an understated but potentially engaging backstory, to say nothing of his massively-powerful living vault. Use Gobseck in your game, and see why money is the root of all evil.

I’m always impressed when something new proliferates quickly. As ideas and concepts are around longer, the successful ones tend to spread around and gain general acceptance, but that usually takes time. It’s when something spreads rapidly that it becomes notable. Such is the case with the catfolk, who only recently made their Pathfinder debut in the Bestiary 3, now having their own supplement in Racial Ecologies: Guide to Catfolk.

Nine pages long, with one page for the OGL and other legal information, the Guide to Catfolk is PC-oriented in the options and information it presents, though nothing stops an enterprising GM from using it for NPCs and world-building as well. The book has no PDF bookmarks, but as its page count remains in the single digits this is forgivable. Similarly, there’s no printer-friendly version, but this can be overlooked for the aforementioned reason.

In terms of its presentation, for such a short book this is fairly graphics-heavy. I was surprised that a nine-page book was over eleven megabytes in size, but looking at the page styles I can see why this was so. The light grey shading on the back of each page is subtle, but impressively detailed, and there are red borders (in a “smear” style) along the top and bottom of each page. There are several full-color illustrations in the book of various catfolk, which were impressively detailed, but which I thought were also slightly off-putting. Partially this was because in most of them their heads seems slightly too large for their bodies.

The opening sections of the book detail the “soft” portions of catfolk; that is, it covers things that aren’t defined by game terms – their history, psychology, society, and so on. The picture this section paints is about what you’d expect, in regards to them being mercurial but loyal, having a nomadic culture that is being assimilated by its neighbors, etc. Much like the artwork, this section presents itself ably, but I found it slightly off-putting; in this case, the writing didn’t present itself as clearly as it could have – while it’s hard to articulate, the text seems to be written in a style wherein the information it delivers is already known, and merely being synopsized for the reader. I suspect that this is due to the author, naturally, already knowing what he wants to say, and so unintentionally not presenting things in a style for someone who isn’t already as familiar with the material. It’s things like this that an editor, which this book didn’t have, would have caught.

The book’s second half deals more directly with new crunch for catfolk, opening with two new mundane weapons that they (or anyone else) can use, and, much to my amusement, presenting catnip as a drug. This last one alone makes me want to run a catfolk character just so I can have him getting high while smoking some ‘nip.

A few magic items are presented before we’re given the standard catfolk racial traits. I was quite glad for this last one, since without the base stats for catfolk, you’re pretty well unable to use this product’s spotlight race unless you already have the Bestiary 3. I commend the book’s author for including this here. Following are a few alternate racial abilities, some traits, and feats (though, in what was perhaps an oversight, no new favored class options).

A surprisingly-detailed adventure outline comes next, and I have to admit I didn’t suspect it to be quite so intricate. No level guidelines are given, but it seems to assume that the PCs’ levels are in the high single-digits. Slightly oddly, it gives stats for a dire tiger that features in the adventure; I say “oddly” here because the base stats for a dire tiger are in the Bestiary 1, which is to say that they’re in the SRD now; a reprinting here wasn’t strictly necessary. Following this we get a full stat block and description for a catfolk NPC, one with double-digit levels.

Overall, the Guide to Catfolk is an adequate expansion for those who want to play a catfolk PC. If you’re looking to play a catfolk in your Pathfinder game, this will scratch that itch. The book doesn’t break any new ground in terms of its presentation, but it’s still commendable for offering options that Paizo (as of this writing) has not. The problems with the book are largely stylistic, and more in terms of tightening up the presentation moreso than anything being truly lacking (save only for the aforementioned favored class options). Had I the option of giving this book three-and-a-half stars, I would have, but I’ll round up to 4. This book may not quite be the cat’s meow, but it’s certainly worth a look.

There’s just something about evil outsiders that makes them perfect for an individual spotlight. As the strongest among them have not only a unique form and powers, but also influence on the mortal world, makes them easy to customize in terms of what they can do and what influence they have on your campaign. Hence, it’s no surprise that Super Genius Games has started a new series of products based around them: the Annals of the Archfiends.

The opening product in this line gives us Phosonith the Cruel Charmer, a devil prince.

A relatively short product at just under ten pages, the book opens with a quick overview of Phosonith’s personality – beneficent in public and wrathful in private – before delving into his history. This was somewhat more expansive than I’d expected, as it took two pages to describe Phosonith’s genesis and rise to power to rule the Stygian city of Ess, along with his current sketch. I suspect I’m in the minority in thinking that what was here was a bit much; while I appreciate back-story as much as anyone, this felt somewhat excessive in how much of Phosonith’s history we’re given. This is particularly true as there were other sections I wish were expanded.

Speaking of which, the next section covers some of the influence that Phosonith has. This opens with a section regarding Phosonith in the real world, which cogently notes that he has no real-world equivalent, but rather was inspired by several duplicitous men in real life (though I confess I was rather irked by its noting of Machiavelli’s The Prince as a source – apparently the author, like most people, didn’t realize that that entire work was sarcastic on Machiavelli’s part, and not meant to be taken quite so literally).

Ahem. The book then covers Phosonith’s cult, including the new Duplicity domain, and is a good example of where the book doesn’t nearly go far enough in what it offers. Let’s leave aside the fact that at no point are we told what other domains (or holy symbol, favored weapon, etc.) you receive for worshipping Phosonith, the information on his cult is quite sparse. We’re given a quick overview of the sorts of people who make up his cult, and paragraph of what they do and don’t do, and that’s it. There’s nothing about their tactics, their current plots, not even an abbreviated stat block for a single example cultist that your PCs can interact with. There’s just very little here, and it’s disappointing.

A page is given to how to portray Phosonith personally, and it does a good job in outlining his appearance and methodology, except in combat. True, a character that focuses on a benign façade shouldn’t get into combat very much, but throw the PCs into the mix and it’s likely to happen, so it would have been nice if the author had talked about how to run Phosonith in the event of a fight. As it is, his stat block is fairly impressive (though his SR should be a few points higher), but I was disappointed that the deception-based powers of the Duplicity domain, which help you negate truth- and alignment-based effects, weren’t mirrored in his stat block. It’s hard to believe the flavor text about how Phosonith goes to great lengths to hide that he’s evil when he can’t even defeat a simple detect evil spell.

The book closes out with an overview of the city of Ess, describing twelve locations within its locale. The locations are fairly interesting, but that they’re numbered is a reminder of the fact that there’s no map of the city itself, which is a shame. I can see the practical reason for this, as a custom map costs money, but it’s still a shame. Equally so is the lack of a city stat block (a la the Pathfinder GameMastery Guide) which would be very helpful here as Ess is supposed to be a planar trade town where all sorts of creatures of all alignments are welcome in Hell. There really should be some city stats here, and the lack of them is a weakness in the product.

Overall, the first book in the Annals of the Archfiends line makes some stumbles out of the gate. Having too much material in some areas and not enough in others, this first book shows that it has potential but needs to realign its focus somewhat. There’s some good material here, which makes it easy to see how it could have been great with a bit more tweaking in some areas. Phosonith the Cruel Charmer presents a nice façade, but an ultimately imperfect one.

There’s a fine line between a classic and a cliché. That’s the case made in the opening of the Creature Codex Volume 4: First Level Foes, which presents six new monsters to spice things up for your fresh-out-of-the-gate adventurers. Rather than send them up against skeletons, big bugs, and short goblinoids, pit them against the half-dozen new freaks on display here.

The book’s technical presentation is fairly strong. There are no bookmarks, but as the file is less than a dozen pages long, I can’t really hold that against it, especially since there is a table of contents. I also appreciate that a printer-friendly file was included; this one removes all of the illustrations, page borders, and cover completely, so there’s nothing to strain your printer even slightly.

Speaking of which, the book’s artistic presentation is quite strong. In addition to page borders on both sides, which flow down along the bottom of the pages as well, each monster has a full-color illustration. This is important, as being able to visualize a monster is a necessary part of their presentation. Heather Frazier did a very impressive job here, as each monster looks as though it was done in a sort of “portrait” style.

So what are these monsters like? Let’s go over them one-by-one in further detail.

The first creature is the aquib, and it probably deserves the award for the lowest-CR monster that has spell resistance. This is thematically appropriate, as it actually devours magic, and is empowered by the spells that fail to get through its SR. I also have to note that this is likely the lowest-level aberration that your PCs will run into. While I can understand being somewhat leery of introducing spell resistance while spellcasting PCs are at their weakest, that’s such a change from what most players expect that that alone makes this monster worthwhile.

The psittacosaurus is the second monster, a real-world dinosaur most noteworthy for its tail quills. As with the aquib, this is a case of introducing a certain sort of monster before your players are expecting it – who would think that their character’s first adventure involved fighting a dinosaur. Very cogently, the monster’s description includes rules for having it as an animal companion.

Also based on the real world, albeit from its mythology, is our third monster, the nuppeppo. I was initially surprised that there was an undead here, as part of the author’s rebuke of typical first-level enemies included skeletons and zombies. That said, this undead is sufficiently different that I feel comfortable giving him a pass on this one. Little more than an ambulatory mass of rotting flesh, the nuppeppo is of a singularly interesting “theme” for its undead nature – sloth. These are the undead formed by people so lazy that their souls couldn’t be bothered to leave their bodies even after death. And you thought not getting out of bed in the morning was lazy! If only for how much fun the concept is, I like this.

The puuk exists as something akin to the evil counterpart of faerie dragons and pseudodragons, which is a nice bit of balance for that particular creature type. I get the distinct impression that these creatures are from some mythology – especially as we’re given a short section on a sort of advanced puuk, called a kaukas – but I’m not certain. Puuks are greedy creatures that can change not only into an animal form, but into a fiery form as well, and can be taken as improved familiars.

The rawhead is the most powerful monster in the book, obviously meant to be something of a “boss monster” for a first-level party, weighing in at CR 3. It’s also an undead, and is fairly similar to other low-level undead in appearance, being a bloody skeleton. Formed from the ugly death of an intelligent animal, rawheads prey on animals, meaning that they’ll likely target characters with companion creatures. Again I’m pleasantly surprised at the focus with which the monster’s niche is crafted, as this once again seems designed to exploit an area where NPCs don’t often direct their attention – this is the first “kill the companion animal” monster I’ve seen. I do wish it had been more than a collection of bones, but I can sympathize with the fact that, when it comes to the walking dead, there are only so many ways of visualizing them.

Finally, the veytha end the book, a race of tall nomads. While there’s little that makes them distinctive in regards to their own mechanics, having only a single special ability unto themselves, it’s their use in a creature type that makes them different. These are the only monstrous humanoid race with no natural Hit Dice; they rely solely on class levels (though their stats are advanced enough that they’re still a bit stronger than your average PC race) to advance. While this, and their appearance, do help to make them unique, I wish they had a little more to make their mechanics stand out – I doubt many PCs will ever notice that they need less food and water (short of being allowed to play a veytha PC – which you could do, as PC racial stats are included), for example.

Overall, I found First Level Foes to be a good method of widening the variety of enemies that your PCs can face as they begin their adventuring career. The book’s raison d’etre is somewhere between presenting certain types of monsters at a low enough level that they can be thrown against a group of starting heroes, and having monsters focus on a niche that isn’t something first-level PCs would expect. In this regard, the book does quite well for itself; so long as you keep focus of what each monster is trying to achieve, there’s a lot of merit here.

The only real complaint I have with the book is that some monsters pull off both sorts of innovation at once (e.g. the aquib), while others don’t quite manage to. It’s great to have your new heroes unexpectedly facing a tiny dragon that can turn into fire; it’s another thing to have what’s killing your pets be another skeletal creature. Still, these creatures aren’t “misses” so much as they’re less-than-solid hits. I’d give the book 4.5 stars if I were able to, but if I have to round, I’ll round up in appreciation for the fact that some GMs might not care about a monster needing to be innovative in every aspect. First Level Foes is a book that will give you some unexpected sorts of monsters to sick on your new adventuring party…and not a goblin in sight.

One of the ways in which Pathfinder (nee Third Edition) is different from previous editions of the world’s most popular fantasy role-playing game is in the proliferation of mechanical character abilities. Whereas before your PC had comparatively little stats, nowadays they have many different mechanics that serve to define what they can and cannot do, from skills to feats to class abilities and more. However, most of these exist largely in a vacuum – while some may be prerequisites to others, few actually build off of each other, and they can form a collection that’s quite disparate in what they offer (particularly for multiclass characters).

It’s in that spirit of tying a character’s abilities more closely together that Misfit Studios has released Superior Synergy: Fantasy for the Pathfinder RPG. Let’s examine it and see how well it ties things together.

Superior Synergy comes as three PDFs, those being the main file, a printer-friendly version thereof, and a short checklist file for the various synergies. Ostensibly, this checklist (which uses a very handy alternating grey-and-white set of rows for each item, making them easily distinguishable) is used to chart which synergies your character qualifies for. However, it should be noted that GMs can make good use of this as a tool for denoting which synergies he allows in his campaign to begin with.

The main file is just over seventy pages in length, and has the technical aspects that a good PDF product should – it comes with full, nested bookmarks, a hyperlinked table of contents, and has the copy-and-paste enabled. These go for the printer-friendly version also, which eliminates the cover, the page backgrounds and borders (those being an off-white and a muddy brownish, respectively), and turns the few interior illustrations from being full color to black and white. I’m personally of the opinion that printer-friendly file should eliminate the illustrations altogether, though that’d usually require a new layout.

So what exactly does Superior Synergy present for your Pathfinder game? Simply put, this book posits that if you have certain prerequisites – be they of skills, feats, class abilities or whatnot – then you can gain an extra benefit. This is usually automatic, but some times will require a check.

The book’s first chapter deals with skill synergies. I need to take a moment to state, in the plainest terms possible, that these are NOT the same as the skill synergies from 3.5. For that matter, these are not even the same as the material from the 3.5 version of Superior Synergy. Rather, these skill synergies function off of making a check with a certain skill, and the check result modifying another skill check.

There’s no ambiguity here regarding what skills affect what, or how long the synergy check takes, etc. as the book goes into very specific detail on the mechanics (as well as the flavor of exactly how) these synergies use. For example, you can make an Acrobatics check which modifies (depending on the check result) a subsequent Climb check made to catch yourself or someone else on a fall, as you’re good at twisting and teetering enough to give yourself a bit of an edge…if you’re lucky. If you’re not, you’ve actually made things worse.

Feat synergy is, perhaps ironically, very similar to a section of new feats (and indeed, the book notes that if you think giving these synergy effects out automatically once the prerequisites are met, you can turn these into new feats). As a Pathfinder aficionado, I was quite happy to note that these prerequisites took into account the materials from the Advanced Player’s Guide, Ultimate Magic, and Ultimate Combat. So for example, if you have Bludgeoner (UC), Dazing Assault (APG), and Weapon Focus, you qualify for the Staggering Blow synergy, which lets you attempt to attempt to stagger a foe for a round. There’s a lot of great material here that lets you put forward a lot of feats that might otherwise be totally ignored (such as some skill-boosters).

For all of that, though, it was the next chapter that was my favorite: class synergies. Simply put, this section is (as I read it) one big love-letter to multiclassing, as it grants synergy abilities from having different class features. If you have the track class ability from being a ranger or inquisitor, and the detect evil power of a paladin, you gain the Track Evil synergy, which grants a bonus to tracking evil creatures. I really enjoyed this section, as it did a lot to make multiclassing sexy again.

The spell synergy section is the only part of the book that doesn’t offer several dozen synergies. Having only a half-dozen synergies, these are the result of using certain types of spells within one round of each other. Perhaps surprisingly, these are written with a more generic stroke, mostly combining types of spells that mostly lend themselves to fairly obvious combinations – here you’ll find rules for using fire and ice to weaken items, electricity conducted by metal or water, and similar things, though at least one (several mental effects at once can confuse a creature) takes a more innovative leap.

The last section of the book is crafting synergy, and basically allows for characters with a nuanced background to craft weapons with built-in non-magical abilities. If you can rage and have Skill Focus for Craft (armor) for example, you can build armor that’s painful to wear but as a result increases how long you can rage (slightly)...but only on a successful Craft check, otherwise you’ve essentially created an item with a slight (non-magical) curse.

The book ends with several pages of the checklist I mentioned at the beginning, something that seems redundant, as the file is already included separately.

Overall, I found Superior Synergy: Fantasy PFRPG Edition to be an expansive book of great options for your characters. Having said that, there are some concerns that I’d want to thoroughly weigh before I used it in my game. For one thing, the synergies that require an extra roll can slow down game-play, though I do appreciate that these are the synergies that aren’t guaranteed to be an extra boost for characters. By contrast, the always-active synergies are faster, but mean that PCs will automatically receive a power bump…though even that’s controllable if you decide to make some of these into feats, or just disallow certain synergies altogether.

It’s that modularity that, I think, really puts this book over the top. There are so many options here, which can be easily added, tweaked, or disallowed, that there’s really no way you can’t find a happy medium in terms of figuring out what parts of this book to allow and what not to. Taking that into account, there are still a few minor problems (a synergy for a paladin’s smite evil and a barbarian’s rage…alignment compatibility issues there), and the occasional spelling and grammar error, but nothing that’s a deal-breaker. I say, start using Superior Synergy, and make your characters more than just the sum of their parts.

I’ve always been on the proverbial fence about “set pieces” – small locations that are written apart from any greater context, allowing them to be dropped into a campaign as a sort of mini-adventure location. In some instances they’re a lot of fun; a quick little adventure that’s easy for the GM and fun for the players. That can be difficult to pull off, however, as they need to have enough context to make sense unto themselves but not so much that they feel too “heavy” to be dropped into an ongoing game. Likewise, they need to have enough of a challenge to be worthwhile, but not so much that they become a killer encounter.

Happily, as far as set pieces go, Headless Hydra Games’s Storage Vaults of Alantes is one of the better ones.

The book’s technical presentation is strong. Having only ten pages (really just over seven, given the cover, credits page, and OGL), you’d think the book wouldn’t be too concerned with how it’s put together – not so. Full nested bookmarks are here, a pleasant surprise, and copy and paste is enabled.

The book has borders along the top and bottom, along with alternating sides, of each page. There’s only a single interior illustration, a black and white image of the new monster found here. The preceding statement is notwithstanding the map, which was actually quite a treat, visually. Done in full color, it’s presented in an unusual, but not unpleasant, isometric style. I’m quite surprised by how well it makes this sort of map work – for a larger area, this perspective would quickly become cumbersome, but here it’s actually very nice to look at. I should also mention that it takes the details of the area descriptions into account; images described as being on the walls can be seen here, which only contribute to the map’s charm.

For a dungeon with only three rooms (more like two, in all honesty), there’s a surprising amount of flavor text here. There’s a background given for why this particular vault was constructed and why it holds the treasures it does. There’s also a motivation given for the PCs to go looking for it (although I found it slightly silly, as well as a bit too vague for my tastes – if the Sultan’s son has been cursed by a witch, why aren’t normal magical remedies working? Perhaps I’m over-thinking such a minor background detail, however), and a sidebar covers what the PCs know about this vault’s particular treasure. The sidebar struck me as slightly odd, as it segues into why the treasure is here in the first place – given that there’s nothing to lead the PCs to this being the treasure’s location in the first place (the scenario makes a lot more sense, I think, if it’s something you have the PCs just happen to stumble onto), this seems somewhat unnecessary.

For a location that has only three rooms – or, more specifically, one hidden entrance and two underground chambers – the more specificity each location has, the better. For the most part, this book does a good job of presenting a large number of details for each location, particularly as the two doors between the three rooms are each set with a puzzle-lock and trap combination.

It’s in regards to these traps where I felt that the book fell down the most. The issue isn’t that the traps are bad; quite the contrary, they’re quite good. The problem is that this is really the same trap, done twice. In the first case, there’s really no good way besides guessing to solve it, which strikes me as slightly unfair. The second iteration of the trap is somewhat less punishing, as there’s a clue given.

There were also some additional details that I felt could have been provided. For example, the last door notes its break DC, but what about simple hardness and hit points? There’s no description of light sources in the main underground chamber, so is it pitch black? A lot was done here to approach these challenges in multiple ways, but while it covered a lot of ground, it could have provided us with more.

My last complaint about the book is with the new monster found at the dungeon’s end. The author made the critical mistake of giving it a movement rate of 0 feet, something that insofar as I’m aware most plant monsters don’t have in the Pathfinder RPG – this is because it encourages the PCs to (once they realize the nature of the threat) back up and pepper it with ranged weapons and spells until it dies. It’s a critical flaw in an otherwise excellently-designed monster.

Of course, there are a few other surprises to be found in the vault, as it houses more than just one treasure. There’s also a suggestion for what to do if you want to have this be the first part of a larger series of adventures, but that, to paraphrase an old axiom, is a tale for another product…

Overall, I thought that this was a very well-done set piece. It had its flaws, both in design (a knock spell can bypass a significant portion of the challenges here) and in presentation (the same trap twice), but it hits far more often than it misses. The traps are designed to be more than just stat blocks, and the manner of overcoming them requires intuitive thinking by the players, and not just their PCs. Likewise, the creature encounters look like a lot of fun (just give the last monster a movement rate), and nicely counterbalance the use of traps. And of course, the treasure at the end makes it all worthwhile. Whether you want to start a new chapter in your campaign, or just want to take a side trek for an evening, you’ll have fun looting the Storage Vault of Alantes.

Time. Some people say time is like a river, flowing swift and sure and only in one direction. But I have seen The Genius Guide to the Time Thief, and I can tell you, they are wrong. Come, and I will tell you a review such as none you have ever heard…

It’s obvious where the inspiration for the time thief comes from, and if you’ve recognized it, then you’ll have a pretty good idea what to expect here. The time thief is a character who is able to manipulate the flow of time around herself to speed up their attacks, undo their failures, and other temporal tricks.

A twenty-level base class for the Pathfinder role-playing game, the basic construction of the class follows the pattern laid out by previous Super Genius Games’ new classes; roughly half of the time thief’s abilities are preset, while the other half lets you choose from a list of available talents (a la the rogue), with said list expanding around 10th level. It’s a great design to allow flexibility in how PCs develop their character while still maintaining structure and balance in what the class offers.

A medium BAB progress, d8 Hit Die class, the time thief’s chief abilities revolve around having a number of “motes” to spend to power many of her time-based class abilities. These motes are moments of her own future, little ones that she won’t miss, stolen from their rightful place in the flow of time and brought back to now when she needs them. Whether adding a bonus to an attack roll or speeding up time to self-heal her wounds, the class’s basic powers are fairly well-grounded in existing mechanics, but often have a time-related spin put on them.

It’s around 5th level when the time thief really starts to break out the wild stuff, though. At that point, she gains “aevum,” which are basically super-motes from specific, important moments in time. Hence, they power greater effects, such as damaging a target with concentrated age, increasing her speed up to “bolt time,” or other dramatic powers. Combined with advanced talents kicking in at 10th level, and suddenly your time thief can pull off some very impressive stunts.

It’s clear that the designers had some fun with this product, as they can’t help but drop references to other movies and other media for names of powers. Back to the Future, Time Runner, Time After Time, I had to take a time out from all of the titles being dropped. Still, it’s part and parcel of the Super Genius package, along with the afterword that discusses using the time thief in your game. I liked how this section characterized the time thief as being an “anti-monk” for how it was an oft-chaotic, undisciplined character who used external factors to get by.

There’s also a short sidebar near the book’s end thanking Veronic F. for modeling for the book, and it’s here that this review finally stops ignoring the elephant in the room – or rather, the vixen – that is its artwork.

If you hadn’t already noticed from its preview, this book doesn’t have illustrations per se (notwithstanding the background of the cover image). Instead, there’s a series of photos of a sexy blonde, the aforementioned Veronic – clad in a skimpy garb; basically a bikini with a half-mask, weapons, and some other ornamentation. Including the cover, there are a half-dozen pictures of her throughout the book’s ten pages, which is an impressive ratio overall.

I’ve heard some people grumble about the use of a live model here instead of drawings, either being uncomfortable with such blatant cheesecake, or because they find the Veronic’s pictures to be lacking in context with the product’s theme, making them pretty but pointless. This latter point, however, ignores how her costume plays to a “fantasy Arabia” theme, which plays perfectly towards the book’s major inspiration.

Likewise, it also deserves mention that Veronic is an alias of porn star and model Jenny Poussin, who in the last few months has earned her gamer cred for not only playing Pathfinder, but also taking pictures of herself dressed up as her last several characters. Hence, her appearance here as the iconic time thief is her and the SGG guys winking at their readers who’re in the know. Needless to say, I really got a kick out of this easter egg, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

But back on topic, the book readily acknowledges that the time thief base class moves outside the usual series of party roles covered by most classes. Not a martial combatant or spellcaster, not a skill monkey or healer, the time thief has a group of powers that provide a somewhat eclectic cavalcade of offensive, defensive, and utility powers, all related by their theme. It’s a great change of pace for a player who wants to step outside the usual boundaries of class functionality. I’d heartily recommend checking out the time thief – both the class and the pictures – you’ll have a good time.

Time. Some people say time is like a river, flowing swift and sure and only in one direction. But I have seen The Genius Guide to the Time Thief, and I can tell you, they are wrong. Come, and I will tell you a review such as none you have ever heard…

One of the defining characteristics of PCs in most role-playing games is that they’re proactive rather than reactive. It’s what comes from being the one raiding dungeons, while the denizens are dealing with your raid. But what would it be like if that paradigm was turned on its head, and you were the one trying to defend your lair from some do-gooders that had suddenly kicked in the door? That’s the primary question your group faces in the second book of the Way of the Wicked campaign: Call Forth Darkness.

Continuing this adventure path for evil characters, Call Forth Darkness is aptly named. Tasked to summon back a banished daemon lord and have him give you a powerful item, your group must first find, conquer, and hold the fortress that the fiendish cult used to inhabit while attempting to stop the forces of good – as well as meddlesome adventurers – from putting the kibosh on your plans.

From a technical standpoint, Call Forth Darkness is a good product, but could have used a few more tweaks. Weighing in at one-hundred-six pages altogether, it has bookmarks to each of the book’s major sections, but I had hoped there would be nested bookmarks to the various sub-sections as well. It does have copy-and-pasted enabled, which is always a good thing.

The book’s graphical presentation is quite strong. The pages are set on a dark tan background, as though the file were an old tome, with black borders along three sides. Michael Clarke continues to impress with his full-color interior illustrations, largely of various personages that your group will encounter throughout the adventure.

I did have a few problems with the pictorial aspects of the book, however. First, I can’t really hold this against the artist, but the maps continue to be done as one square equaling ten feet. This makes it difficult to reproduce these in battle-mat size, but as I said, this isn’t really Fire Mountain Games’ fault – there’s only so much you can tweak the scale you want to set things at. Secondly, it should be noted that the book comes with three files – the main PDF, a printer-friendly version, and a book of players’ handouts.

The printer-friendly version was something of a disappointment. It’s only changes were to remove the tan background and set the page borders to being line-scaling rather than a full color border. That’s good, but it’s not enough – not when the full-color cover and interior illustrations remain. These should have been removed entirely (requiring an adjusted layout) or at least set to grayscale. That they weren’t makes this not nearly as printer-friendly as it should have been.

Similarly, the players’ handouts consist of four pages. One is a wilderness map, two are the two pages of maps of the Horn of Abaddon (the evil fortress), and the final one is an illustration of one of the dungeon denizens.

But enough about that, let’s look at the meat of the adventure and see what new evil your group is doing!

After the ubiquitous introduction and adventure background, things are broken up into four “acts” each of which is sub-divided into various “events.”

The first act covers everything prior to the arrival at the dungeon. Herein, the PCs receive their next assignment, taking them to the frontier town of Farholde and meeting with their support (a local baron, as well as another of the nine groups helping to overthrow the current order), before setting out to locate the Horn of Abaddon.

Taking up less than ten percent of the book’s total page-count, this section of the adventure wasn’t bad, but was clearly the book’s weak point. I say that not because there’s a dearth of action here (though there is), but rather than there’s not enough exposition on what can really be done at this stage. For example, it’s helpful (though not necessarily expected) that the PCs start to develop a minion organization during the adventure, with the unspoken assumption that some part of it will be set up in Farholde; however, there’s little here that really helps to put that part of the adventure forward.

Now, to be fair, there is some support for this part of the adventure at this stage – just not enough. Meeting with the local baron and securing his aid is helpful, and having another “knot” of evil-doers backing you up from the town is a mixed blessing, but notwithstanding the gazetteer of Farholde itself, that’s really all that there is. While the section on running an evil organization does talk a little about finding minions in Farholde, I’d have preferred that there were a few events placed here to let the PCs work their way into the town’s seedy underbelly and set up the beginnings of a network before they went into the wild.

Speaking of the wild, the book somewhat glosses over the task of finding the Horn. Even presuming that they find the map to it, the book rather oddly sets finding the location as a Perception, rather than Survival skill. Moreover, it seems like there’s some wasted potential for further encounters here – the few spots that are marked on the GMs map receive extremely little coverage (said coverage is given in their events later in the book, rather than having an overview in act one). There could have been a lot more here to help round out the environment – at the very least it would have been nice to have had a table of random encounters!

It’s at the second act, however, that the book really begins to shine. Here, the PCs discover the Horn, and at first it’s not too dissimilar from any other dungeon crawl, as the PCs have to explore the place, deal with some of the creatures that have already moved in, and figure out their next move. While the adventure doesn’t expressly spell out that they need to try and dominate, rather than eradicate, most of the local monsters, the encounters are somewhat slanted in that direction – a smart group will quickly figure it out. This is particularly true since, if the PCs root out all of the Horn’s secrets (and the adventure assumes they do, to the point of having a sidebar saying what to do if some critical information slips by them), they’ll realize that they’ll need to conduct a ritual that takes months to complete in order to complete their mission.

As I mentioned, this is where the adventure really takes off. The PCs start to interact with various creatures that require longer-term thinking on their part. What monsters should be slain, and which should be subjugated? Can the first line of good-aligned defenders be manipulated, or should you destroy them on sight? The adventure sometimes tilts things subtly in one direction, but by and large it’s refreshing how it lets the party make their own decisions, and reap the rewards or consequences therein. The author makes sure to say what various creatures do over time.

The book also notes certain things that can increase the local security, earning “Security Points.” Oddly, the points have no particular effect save to earn bonus XP for the party – while the individual defenses do make a difference in and of themselves, I’d have thought that there’d be more of an effect in terms of what the Security Points do to potential invaders – a missed opportunity there, albeit a slight one.

The book’s third act is where the PCs need to shift from offense to defense. Because the ritual they’re performing takes months, the book outlines things week by week, and various interlopers start in from the very beginning. The book does a truly remarkable job of blending in layers of plot here, as the PCs’ “allies” will send them varying degrees of advanced notice (though how these notices are sent is left frustratingly vague), all in accordance with their own plans, as they learn about adventurers and crusaders heading towards the Horn.

This is where the book also starts to introduce monsters from beyond the first Pathfinder Bestiary. It’s a small but refreshing change to see creatures from the Bestiary 2 or Tome of Horrors being used here, and helps to keep the PCs on their toes. This is also when the PCs are most likely to have their own group of minions that they can command, both in terms of the subjugated monsters and in their organization in Farholde.

I also really have to compliment the author on the structure of the various groups the PCs face. The composition of enemies here is something that only a gamer would think of. You have groups ranging from uber-good crusaders who strike hard and fast, to the all-neutral party who isn’t vulnerable to anti-good measures. Some groups come with plenty of advanced warning and just walk in the front door; some do their homework beforehand and (likely) get the drop on the PCs. All are written with a battle strategy (as part of their stat block), and many discuss what they do if they manage to flee. Several even have some ties to the previous adventure, building a strong sense of continuity beyond the usual “sequence of events” that most adventure paths have.

The book’s final act takes place during the last five days of the months-long ritual, and its here that the heat is really turned up on the PCs. With their summoning almost done, there’s a lot of attention focused on them, and the adversaries come hard and fast. From other evils that want to hijack the ritual to desperate defenders of goodness, and more, the PCs are effectively under siege, both from without and from within. The denouement of the adventure is exceptional in its crafting, so much so that I honestly think your players will likely remember this as one of the best adventures they’ve ever played.

Following this, the book still has more in store. Several pages are dedicated to the running of an evil organization. Surprisingly, this is fairly simple in terms of mechanics. While I was initially suspicious of it being based around the Leadership feat, I did like that it makes it so that Leadership gives you the usual cohort, but the followers are instead set up as an organization. The organization is treated as a single entity, and can perform so many actions per week (more if multiple PCs throw in as co-leaders), presuming a successful check. A list of about two dozen actions is given, followed by a series of possible events that can happen, and some further discussion.

The town of Farholde is given roughly a half-dozen pages of examination, including a map of the town. There’s quite a lot here, and an enterprising GM will use the information to help personalize the townsfolk while the PCs are here – the information here seems almost excessive given how the PCs will likely spend most of the their time holed up in the Horn.

The book’s final section talks about modifying the campaign depending on the composition of the party. To be more clear, it discusses running the campaign if you have party members that are of the same type of class (e.g. all clerics), or of the same race (e.g. all goblins). In practice, this section mostly lays down background for why such a group would have existed in the first place. There is some discussion regarding modifying the feel of the campaign, but nothing too specific is given for even major game-changers (e.g. if your entire party lacks spellcasters). There is, however, a single new feat given for creatures that are sensitive to light.

I was personally hoping for a section on what to do for replacement PCs should some die over the course of the campaign. Given the importance of the back-story, and the group’s secretive nature (plus how they’re operating under the oversight of their master), it seems like new characters would be very hard to come by. Hopefully a future book will address this.

Overall, this is a book that starts slowly and builds its way up to a truly epic crescendo. While there are some parts that could have been fleshed out better, what’s here is massive in scale and breathtaking in scope. From the all-too-short sections that deal with Farholde (a much more interesting town that it had a right to be) to clearing and refurbishing the dungeon to the incredible dungeon-defense sections to the harrowing conclusion, this is an adventure of grandeur. Throw in the formation of your own evil organization to lord over, and I have to wonder if this campaign hasn’t already hit its high point; certainly this will be a hard act to follow.

If you haven’t already started to walk the Way of the Wicked, then let this be the reason to begin doing so – you’ll never have so much fun as when you Call Forth Darkness.

I’ve long been of the opinion that one of the strengths of the d20 system, of which Pathfinder is the primary inheritor, is its unified mechanics. Few are the places I appreciate this more than the transparency between PC and NPC rules, particularly for monsters and races. True, they don’t always match up 100% perfectly, but as someone who remembers what a headache it was trying to add class levels to monsters in previous editions, what we have now is by far better.

Purple Duck Games supplement Legendary Races: The Cyclops is a testament to this facet of game design. Because while I’ve never personally had a player ask to play a cyclops, I’ve now got that angle covered should it ever come up (plus some cool options in the meanwhile).

The book is a short one, being a sixteen-page PDF. Pleasantly, there’s also a second PDF of counters; small squares with images of various creatures from the book that can be easily placed on your battlemat. Several different sizes are available here, reflecting the various sizes of the cyclopes and cyclopes-kin that the book presents. Likewise, the primary PDF has full nested bookmarks and has copy and pasting enabled.

Several black and white illustrations break up the book, roughly a half-dozen all told. There is no printer-friendly version of the book available, but in all honesty your printer should be able to handle what’s here anyway. There’s also no epublishing file, so if you don’t like how PDFs display on an ereader or tablet, you’re going to be out of luck.

I usually talk about my overall impression of a book at the end of my review, saving it for after I’ve discussed all of the different sections, but in this case it seems more apropos to mention up front how much I enjoyed this book. I really feel like a standard was set here in terms of presenting a truly holistic amount of information regarding presenting a race for use in the Pathfinder RPG.

For example, the book opens with a few pages talking about the cyclopes’ racial history, society, and physiology before moving into game stats. From there we get a new weapon (a shuriken-like throwing weapon called the gieve), before moving into how to play a cyclops PC. This is handled by breaking the Bestiary cyclops down into a racial class. This harkens back slightly to Third Edition, being a class that essentially must be taken, and cannot be multiclassed out of until it’s complete, but the class is only six levels long, so it doesn’t seem particularly cumbersome.

If you can’t stand racial levels, however, the book has you covered with its new half-cyclops race. A human-cyclops mix, this race is equivalent to the standard races in power. It’s not simply tossed out without any support either – the book presents a good deal of flavor information before presenting the racial mechanics. Moreover, it then gives expanded descriptions for how half-cyclops do in each PC class (not including the UM and UC classes, as this book predates them), and has both alternate racial traits and several new favored class options. More than anything else, these extras helped give the entire book a very comprehensive scope.

A single new legendary weapon is presented next, a shout-out to those using Purple Duck Games’s Legendary Weapon supplements. If you don’t have those, it may be of more limited use. Interestingly, one of the weapon’s powers is a psionic one, with the particular power reprinted here in its entirety. A sidebar converts the power into a divine spell for those who hate psionics.

A couple new feats are presented next, and this is one of the areas where I felt the book could have been tightened up a little more. For example, Intimidating Orb gives a cyclops (of half-cyclops) a +4 to Intimidate checks. Fair enough, but with ten or more ranks in the skill, the Persuasive feat in the Core Rulebook will give you that, and a +4 bonus to Diplomacy to boot (and you don’t need to be a cyclops to take it). Likewise, the Otherworldly Gaze feat lets you gain a +2 to gaze and blindness attacks…but feats like Great Fortitude add a +2 save bonus to a much wider set of saves.

A new oracle mystery comes next, along with a sample 1st-level NPC. After this, we receive two new templates, the man-eater and the god-scored (which, oddly, do not have sample NPCs of their own). I quite enjoyed these templates, as they both play into the theme of degenerate cyclopes, but remain broad enough that they can be applied to most creatures (there were a few nitpicks that I had, like the man-eaters bite being a secondary natural attack, or the god-scorned’s punish the prideful attack deal a whopping 4 points of ability drain on a failed strike – ouch!).

The book ends with a new monster, the chthonic cyclops, a huge creature weighing in at a hefty CR 16! Presumably these are meant to represent the cyclopes as they once were.

Overall, I quite enjoyed this book. While it had a few rough patches (where are the half-cyclops’ height/weight and age tables? And does the gieve count for the half-cyclops’ weapon familiarity, since “cyclops throwing star” is a parenthetical name for the weapon?), it seriously went the extra mile in rounding out what could have been a very terse racial presentation, while still keeping a very tight focus. Small errors notwithstanding, this is a great resource for those who want to show that a one-eyed character can be king even beyond the land of the blind.

Supplements that add new spells are, more than anything else in Pathfinder, risky for a GM. While feats are fairly tame in how powerful they are, and magic items can be destroyed or stolen in-game, a new spell that wreaks havoc tends to be difficult to extract. So adding even a few new spells to your campaign can be a cautious exercise.

Taking a look at Rite Publishing’s 1001 Spells, however, will make you want to throw caution to the wind.

A compilation of Rite Publishing’s series of 101 X-Level Spells, this puts all of the previous material in one place (strictly speaking, it also means that there should be 1,010 spells here; I confess that I haven’t counted). I haven’t confirmed that any previous errata or fixes are present here, but given that my PDF copy has “v4” at the end of its file-name, there are likely some changes that have been made.

In terms of the books technical presentation, I was actually a little surprised by how minimalist its approach was. To be fair, it does have full bookmarks to each section and the beginning of each alphabetical listing of spells (e.g. you can click to go to the beginning of all the spells that start with “B”), and copy-and-pasting is enabled. No printer-friendly version (or epublishing version) is present, however.

Moreover, there’s no introduction or discussion of what’s here. The book goes straight from the credits page to the spell lists. These lists are initially only given for the Core Rulebook spellcasting classes. The APG and Ultimate Magic class spell lists are presented as appendices at the end of the book, something that found to be an oddly artificial distinction; why not just list them in the beginning with all of the other classes?

I suspect that the answer to this one may be in how none of the original spells were written with these additional classes in mind. Each spell’s listing, for example, deals only with the Core classes; if you want to know if a given spells can be cast by an alchemist or an inquisitor, you won’t be able to tell just by reading its entry – you’ll have to go check its spell list.

If it sounds like I have only bad things to say about this book, rest assured that these are merely footnotes. I’d much prefer that these issues were tended to, but it doesn’t change the fact that what’s here are over a thousand spells which are as innovative as they are imaginative. It’s unfortunate that I can’t go into any significant detail in this review, simply because there are so many spells of such a diverse nature, but when you have spells like Minor Miracle (a cleric’s Limited Wish), Steal the Painful Memory (remove the memory of an event from a large group of people), Counter Silence (a somatic-only spell that dispels magical silence), or Giant Boulder (guess what you’re throwing now), how can you not want to see more?

I should note that I’ve personally used some of these spells (albeit not a lot) in my game, so I speak from experience when I say that the book’s tagline is true – this really will make it more agonizing to pick what spells you learn throughout the campaign, simply because there are so many great ones here that you won’t be able to easily pick.

I also have to commend the book for coming with a dataset for Hero Lab. I don’t use the program myself, but I know a lot of people who do, and I suspect that this will make the book into a “must have” for them.

Overall, I’d give this book four and a half stars were I able, due to the class listing thing; as it is, I’m rounding this up to a full five stars simply because what’s here is so plentiful that I can’t really hold such a comparatively minor problem against it. 1001 Spells will give you more new magic than you could possibly use in a campaign, but you’ll have a lot of fun trying.

I generally don’t agree with the sentiment that spellcasters, particularly wizards, are overpowered. To me, that’s something that’s true more on paper than in actual game-play. However, it’s undeniable that contemporary spell-design does think this way. Simply put, spells are designed to have one specific effect and no other; indeed, many spells will devote considerable space to telling you what they can’t do. That’s understandable, but ironically it takes some of the magic away from spellcasting. What’s happened to spells that have wide and creative applications?

The answer is simple: they’ve all migrated to Advanced Arcana II, by Necromancers of the Northwest.

Okay, the above sentiment is an exaggeration, but only slightly. Whereas most supplements that introduce new spells are just a hodge-podge collection of spells thrown together, Advanced Arcana II, like its predecessor volume, has several new themes to what it presents. We’ll go over these, but first let’s take a look at the book’s technical construction.

Weighing in at just over a hundred pages in length, Advanced Arcana II hits all of the checkboxes that a PDF should. It contains full, nested bookmarks. It allows for copying and pasting (I’m pleased to say that there are virtually no errors with pasting copied text here). Moreover, there’s a printer-friendly version of the book, which is always a plus. That said, the printer-friendly version eliminates the page backgrounds, removes one page of ads near the end of the book, and sets the remaining colors to grey – however, it does keep the interior illustrations, simply graying them. I’d have preferred removing the artwork altogether, something I’m presuming they didn’t do because it’d require a ne layout.

In terms of artwork, the book makes a fairly good showing for itself. All of the pages are set on a cream-colored “parchment” background, which makes it look as though the book is an actual tome. Periodic full-color illustrations break up the text, all of which are CG stock art pieces (oddly, each piece is captioned with a copyright notice for the original creator – I’d have thought it’d be enough to note them in the credits page).

The book opens with a one-page in-character introduction, and then a four-page opening (which is also in-character). It’s after this that we’re given an introduction by the actual game designers. Advanced Arcana II, they tell us, is different from its predecessor volume in that it wants to deal with the mutable nature of spells. To this end, its largely concerning itself with three “types” of spells – the first of these are “modal” spells, which allow for spells to have different effects, but you can only choose one when you cast it (a la fire shield). The second are conditional spells, where the local conditions determine how effective a spell is (e.g. a spell that causes fear is more effective in dim light). Finally, we see the return of segmented spells here; spells that have to be cast multiple times in rapid succession to have their effect take place.

This is last idea is turned on its head, however, as it puts two new variations on that theme: the first are segmented spells that can be cast a differing (instead of a set) number of times, with the number of casting affecting the spell’s efficacy. The variation allows for layering effects to manifest with each casting of a segmented spell, allowing for stacking effects per casting.

Interestingly, the book then goes on to detail another theme that many of its spells deal with: age. Specifically, there are a number of spells here that deal with adding or draining age from a creature – it should be noted though that none of these spells have aging as a “cost” of casting the spell (something from older editions of the game, which I sort of miss). I have to commend the designers here, as they delve into the mechanics of aging in Pathfinder and make sure no aspect of this is overlooked. They deal with questions of aging modifiers to mental ability scores and physical ones, with how different sorts of creatures age (e.g. what to do if you’re uncertain of how a monster lives).

While it doesn’t call it out as its own section, per se, the book then delves into a series of optional rules, mostly in regards to adding new spells to your game. The book cogently notes that it can be awkward to have new spells just suddenly appear in your campaign, particularly for divine spellcasters who have access to the whole of their spell lists. To that end, the book presents several ideas, such as having rare spells costing more or being harder to scribe, to having a “spells known” like ability for divine spellcasters using non-Core spells, to just having an in-game Advanced Arcana II be available to peruse. There are a lot of good ideas here that are worth exploring.

Full spell lists are presented next, which make sure to cover all of the spellcasting classes in the Core Rulebook, APG, and Ultimate Magic, before we finally move on to the spells themselves. I should mention here that while most of the spells fall under the themes described above, there are still a handful that are presented that don’t match with any of them, something I thought was great for rounding out the material in the book.

If Advanced Arcana II had ended there, that would still have been a lot. Instead, however, the book has several appendices where we’re actually given even more material to work with. The book’s first appendix is another in-game treatise describing several of the spellcasters whose names appear the spells given earlier. It’s a slight shame that this section is entirely in-character, as I would have preferred a stat block, or at the very least an abbreviated line detailing their race, class, and levels.

The second appendix, however, was much more fun. Here we’re given a truly expansive section on customized spellbook designs. These allow for three basic parts: customized binding (the hardness), customized paper (the hit points), and customized inks. Customized ink represents changing the spells scribed in the spellbook, so that there are altered effects whenever such a spell is prepared. For example, if you scribe a spell in alchemical mercury, when you cast that specific spell after preparing it from that spellbook, you get a +2 bonus to beating spell resistance. I should also note that the sections on binding and pages also have several special abilities depending on the material used, in addition to altering hardness and hit points. The balancing mechanism here, of course, is that these are all expensive, all the moreso if you use multiple options.

The book’s third appendix presents a half-dozen new familiars. I have to admit that I really enjoy new familiars, so I was tickled by what was here. Some of these were mundane animals that were rather oddly overlooked until now (a dog, for example), while others were creatures you wouldn’t ordinarily think of (a goldfish), and others were outlandish (a swarm of magical flies). Each has a full stat block, an expansive description, and a notation on what their familiar benefit is (as these are all standard familiars, and not improved familiars).

Appendix four presents four new arcane bonds for wizards. These are an elemental bond (sub-typed by what element is chosen), a bond to a location (which can be changed, though not quickly), a bond with a particular spirit, and a bond to your spellbook. This last one, in particular, seemed apropos – I’m amazed it wasn’t offered in the Core Rulebook.

The book closes out with a final appendix of thirty optional material components that can be added to a spell to lend it some extra power. Most of these come from specific creatures, and likewise only affect certain groups of spells. For example, a kraken’s eye allows for any conjuration spell, affecting it as per the Widen Spell metamagic feat. A handy chart lists how much these can be purchased for.

Overall, Advanced Arcana II actually managed to top the high bar set by its predecessor, something I didn’t think was possible. While the book presents so many new spells, its innovations come from the fact that it stretches the boundaries of what its spells can do, from being augmented by local conditions to packing variable options into its effects to the sheer brilliance that are segmented spells. Add in things like the variant spellbook construction rules and the new familiars and arcane bonds, and there’s so much great stuff in here that it’s hard to justify not using this book in your game. I say, five stars to this book – it deserves every one of them. Pick it up and advance your game’s spellcasters!

In over two years since its debut, Pathfinder hasn’t tried to stretch its wings very much where the genre of the game is concerned; it’s all high-fantasy, all the time. While many gamers may not miss this, those looking to take their favorite rules into another style of game likely feel that they’re missing out. It’s with those gamers in mind that Eridanus Books presents their sci-fi Pathfinder RPG, Veil of Truth. Let’s peek behind the veil and see what’s waiting there.

At twenty-eight pages long, Veil of Truth’s presentation is something of an exercise in minimalism. There are no bookmarks here, nor hyperlinks. The interior art is all black and white, and is passable, though a few of the illustrations of the alien races were slightly pixilated. All of the pages have plain white backgrounds, with no borders of any kind, making the book mostly printer-friendly as a default.

The text here is notably dense. While I wasn’t sure if the word font here was smaller than in other books, it may be that a lot of the visual presentation is helped by the pictures, tables, and sidebars that frequently pop up. It was only in the book’s last section, when most of these went away, that I felt like I was being shown a thick wall of text.

Veil of Truth takes the design principle that Pathfinder is, as far as a sci-fi RPG goes, mostly complete save only for some additions, subtractions, and re-skinning certain things. The first chapter reminds us of this in regards to races, even as it presents seven new ones. These races are presented with full Core Rulebook-style treatment, and do a good job of describing them. In terms of how they “feel,” six out of seven are humanoid in body type (though they’re apparently all of the humanoid creature type), so there’s little here that is too far removed from the old “humans with funny hats” meme.

It’s at the classes chapter that we start to see just how much Veil of Truth acts as a supplement to Pathfinder. There are six classes available, all of which are essentially archetypes of existing classes. The engineer, for example, is a variant of the Advanced Player’s Guide’s summoner, while the psion is a sorcerer, etc.

By itself, this is a pretty good idea. However, these go a bit further than most archetypes, to the point where it’s almost more worthwhile to call them alternate classes, a la the ninja and samurai. Unfortunately, given that this is the case, the book’s minimalist style works against it here, as there are no class tables to codify what class features are earned when; it’s all descriptions. It’s also notable that the relative power of the classes is altered somewhat in these new presentations, largely because “spellcasting” (which is really the use of psionic powers, nanites, and retroviruses) is devalued here – a lot of the more blatant attack spells (e.g. fireball, lightning bolt) simply aren’t available. The default assumption seems to be that because of this, classes that give away their spellcasting altogether (e.g. the aforementioned engineer), need less-powerful alternates to replace them. As such, while only the psion is a true caster class, you may appreciate the reduced overall power a lot of the classes have here.

Unfortunately, the book seems to be missing a section or two, and it’s in this chapter that we first get a clue as to that. The psion’s psychic manifestion abilities make reference to spending psionic power points, for example, but while it says it refers to these more in the book’s “third chapter” (and even references a table found there) said chapter is nowhere to be found; it doesn’t help that there are no chapter numbers here anyway. I also took issue with how the psion is supposed to gain a discipline power every odd level, but some of the disciplines had less than ten powers to select to begin with – that’s just poor design.

The book’s third section is a one-page coverage of skills in Veil of Truth. There’s no discussion of what skills are deleted here, save for noting the alternate applications of a few skills (e.g. Fly, Ride, etc.) and bringing in a few alternate skills (e.g. Psionics rather than Spellcraft). I should mention that the Psionics skill, which is barred from use by characters that don’t have it as a class skill (there’s a feat for that, by the way), actually lets you pull off some abilities that replicate actual spells (e.g. detect thoughts, cure light wounds) though only a few times per day. This is a notable bump in power, enough so that even with a feat-tax on most characters, it’s a must-have skill (especially since all of its uses are against static DCs).

Feats are similarly single-paged in their display, and while several are replacements for normal Pathfinder feats, a number are specific to the new races presented earlier.

The equipment chapter may be the most fun part of the book, simply because it’s cool to see a bunch of high-tech guns, and other items, in Pathfinder. These all fall into one of three new types of weapon proficiency, and all have a description, but there’s no listing as to whether they’re one- or two-handed, which is an oversight. There are also notably few armors, simply because most guns attack your touch AC at closer ranges anyway (a la the gunslinger).

It’s after these that the book begins to show some real innovation, as it then introduces us to ultratech items. It may sound odd to call these innovative, as they’re essentially re-skinned magic items, but there are some interesting spins on them here. For example, the armors here all have various spells that can be used on the wearer, but only so many before they have to be recharged; other ultratechs also need recharging, but are so large that they can only be mounted on a vehicle or be found as part of a building.

The last section of the book presents the Veil of Truth campaign setting proper. I found it to be a nice change of pace from the typical campaigns where humans are a dominant power. The gist of this is that Earth was basically treated as a nature preserve by aliens that were already aware of us, and gave us time to develop not out of altruism, but simply because they knew that most races that managed to make contact with galactic society tended to self-destruct from the extreme culture shock. Humans nearly did, but have managed to avoid total self-annihilation, and are slowly coming back from the brink. There’s more nuance than that, of course, and more information on the greater backdrop, but it’s still a pretty minimalist presentation – all the better for GMs to fill things in as they go along.

Overall, I found Veil of Truth to be a book that was defined almost as much by what isn’t here as what is. There’s nothing regarding starships or starship combat, for example, let alone things like planet-busting weapons, robots and cyborgs, genetic engineering, etc. I can respect that they stuck to adapting the Pathfinder rules as much as possible, but there are some things that aren’t so easily brought into a sci-fi game by just re-flavor-texting something from a fantasy genre. The fact that there are also problems with some missing things (mostly related to the psion’s use of psychic powers and abilities), and this book seems to serve more as a template for a sci-fi Pathfinder game than a fully-fledged game unto itself. Ultimately, there are a lot of ways to do sci-fi, but I wish there was a little more truth behind the Veil.

Epic level gameplay – that is, advancing beyond twenty class levels – has long been the sticky wicket of Pathfinder. Ever since Third Edition’s attempt at epic-level gaming turned out so underwhelming, Pathfinder has been unwilling to venture beyond 20th level, and while many are fine with never going back to such heights, there are still plenty of players who want to take their game beyond this final boundary.

Now Little Red Goblin Games has answered that desire, presenting Legendary Levels as the first product for the Pathfinder RPG to allow for characters to continue advancing beyond the 20th-level barrier. Let’s crack the covers and see just how legendary this book is.

Exactly seventy pages long, Legendary Levels hits most of the technical specifications that we hold for an RPG PDF. It presents full, nested bookmarks, as well as a hyperlinked table of contents. It does lack a printer-friendly version, however, which may be an issue for your printer given that the pages are set on a grayish-tan background. I didn’t care much for the book’s interior artwork, which has both black and white and color pieces; I found it to have too much of a “rough” or “unfinished” look about it, as though more clean-up could have been done. It’s a minor point though, as there’s comparatively little art here.

It’s also worth noting that the book didn’t clearly identify its Open Game Content and Product Identity, something the OGL requires it to do (and the Section 15 was barren, too). I mention this only because this becomes a problem if anyone else wants to use what’s here in their own Pathfinder-compatible products down the road. Hopefully there’ll be an update fixing these issues.

After a brief introduction to “legendary levels” (as a note, I liked that the book’s authors decided to rename the entire concept of post-20th-level as “legendary” rather than “epic”), the book’s first section acts as an overview of some of the major game mechanics that legendary game-play utilizes. Of particular importance are divinity scores and legendary damage.

The divinity score represents the character actually manifesting a divine spark that can, if grown, transform them into an actual deity. I personally applaud this integration of legendary levels and gaining godhood, since I think that once you’ve reached such a high-level of gaming, having your characters start to become divinities is a natural progression. However, you don’t HAVE to increase your divinity score…some classes, mostly the spellcasters, have this increase incrementally as they level. However, you can also boost it with specific feats, or by gaining followers (that is, people who revere/worship you).

It should be noted that this is very different from Third Edition’s divinity rules, in that having a divinity score has little mechanical impact on your character, something I think a lot of players will appreciate. Interestingly, an accompanying chart shows how much your divinity score increases based on how many followers you have, and what sort of gods are found with what scores (e.g. a low score is like a regional deity, a higher one is like a primal force, etc.). Having said all of that, I noticed that it’s hard to get your divinity score high enough to start earning followers if you don’t have legendary levels in a spellcasting class.

Legendary damage, by contrast, is essentially damage so powerful that it can be instantly fatal. Dealing legendary damage to a creature is the same as damaging it normally, but the damage includes a Fort save which, if failed, reduces the target to 0 hp. There’s no single way to gain the ability to inflict legendary damage, but rather it’s found in the abilities of various legendary classes and prestige classes.

The book introduces a few concepts here that it goes into more detail on later (such as true dweomers), but there are a few other aspects to this first chapter that I wanted to touch on. For instance, it also reintroduces legendary uses of skills. This is, much like the old epic level rules, a table with various skills listing very high DCs for greater effects. It’s also the first part of the book that rubbed me the wrong way. I can recognize the problems with super-high skill DCs to achieve effects that magic can pull off at very low levels (e.g. a very high Acrobatics check allows you to be effectively weightless…which I suppose is okay if you can’t just fly), but I consider that to be a problem inherent to the mechanics of Pathfinder, and so can’t really be helped very much.

What I really didn’t like about these legendary skill uses was that, as with normal skill uses, a lot of these present static DCs which, once you can meet them, allow for abuse. You know how Diplomacy has the old problem of, once you’ve got a high bonus, you can make anyone your friend? Well, hit a DC of 40 plus the other guy’s Charisma modifier, and you can make him literally worship you. I can tell you that I’d never allow that in my game.

Beyond this, Legendary Levels does keep presence of mind enough to give us the necessary (but easily-overlooked) basics for leveling our characters beyond 20th level. We get XP progressions to 30th level with the fast, medium, and slow advancements, as well as a listing of GP values by level, and iterative attack values (which, interestingly, allow for more than four attacks if your bonus is high enough to gain more iterative attacks).

Note that all of these expansions stop at 30th level. The book never actually says this is as high as PCs can possibly go, but it seems to be the default assumption (it also briefly mentions gestalt play, but this seems like an extended sidebar more than anything else). Likewise, there’s nothing said about advancing existing classes. Even the basic eleven classes aren’t advanced so much as they’re given a ten-level supplementary class…

It’s on that note that we move into the second section of the book, which presents the legendary classes. These eleven classes are legendary mirrors of the eleven classes from the Core Rulebook. Somewhat oddly, as I mentioned before, these are considered separate classes from their non-legendary counterparts, but they go out of their way to make sure they function as extensions of them (e.g. levels in legendary barbarian are treated as levels in barbarian for all barbarian class features). Once again, the book breaks from Third Edition’s epic level conventions as these all present standard (for their class) progressions for BAB and saves.

The classes themselves are too many to go into detail here, but some major themes are notable. A big one is that legendary damage is a major facet of class advancement, both in terms of dealing it and being able to protect yourself against it. Some of its uses seem better than others, but not egregiously so. There’s also a very clear attempt to increase the power of martial characters versus their spellcasting counterparts; these characters seem to get more over the course of their levels, and have greater emphasis on legendary damage.

To be clear, there are no legendary classes specific to the new classes from the APG, UM, or UC (though those classes are occasionally referenced in areas like the new spells). Likewise, there’s no mention of archetypes here. The book does present legendary classes to the three new base classes given in other Little Red Goblin Games’ supplements, though, which will be of limited use to anyone not owning those books. Five new prestige classes, which seem to be for those who can’t take legendary class levels, are also given; these cover a broad enough array to be fairly generic (e.g. juggernaut or lord of war for martial characters, archmage for arcane spellcasters, etc.) in terms of what classes they’ll appeal to. I do wish there’d been something built more towards multiclass characters here, but at least those characters get a nod in the feats section.

The feats section (which was annoyingly lacking in a summary table) did present a fairly robust set of feats to round out what can be done at legendary levels. The aforementioned multiclass characters are noted in that there are feats that grant limited access to some of the class abilities from the legendary classes. The bulk of the spellcasting feats are impressive for what they offer (High Magic puts an automatic Intensify Spell effect on all spells below 5th level that you cast, for instance, to keep low-level spells relevant), but once again, the combat-focused feats get the most emphasis, though it’s more equitable. It’s a bit of an easter egg that we’re given summary charts for the bonuses and penalties given by Power Attack, Combat Expertise, and Deadly Aim at the end of the section.

True Dweomers are presented next. Most of the basic information on them is presented earlier, in the book’s first section where it goes over legendary spells; in this case, spell levels top out at 12th, and full-progression spellcasting classes automatically gain access to those slots as they level up. However, for true dweomers (which don’t have a spell level per se) you can only use one per day, and learning EACH ONE requires taking a feat! The Sacred Spells presented next are slightly more generous, not having the once-per-day restriction, nor requiring feats; moreover, they have spell levels, and so can be prepared by legendary clerics and oracles. Both types of spells only have about a half-dozen examples presented, however, which I thought was rather limited.

Legendary encounters is presented next, and this short section of the book was also disappointing for how sparse it was. Leaving aside the possibility of legendary NPCs, this section had far too little for characters that have surpassed 20th-level. There are four templates here: the legendary creature template (which, ironically, is a simple template; though for all its bonuses it doesn’t seem to live up to its +20 CR adjustment), the deity template, the godspawn template, and the colossus template (which can only be applied to constructs, and is where the rules for colossal+ creature sizes are found). Unfortunately, the authors’ diligence from before isn’t to be found here, as not only do these latter three templates not have CR adjustments, but there’s no listing of the XP values of creatures with a CR of higher than 25.

The book’s final section covers legendary magic items. Not artifacts, these are magic items (specifically armor and weapon properties, rings, rods, and wondrous items) taken to legendary levels. To its credit, the book does talk about the rules for crafting these (and even legendary mundane weapons), and does present us with bonus pricing for legendary weapons and armor. The magic items themselves aren’t bad, but I found some (though not all) of the weapon and armor properties a bit dull – a crushing weapon does double damage, and enemies take a -2 on attacks and damage for 1 round on a critical hit. Much more fun is a volcanic weapon, which is a flaming weapon that spews frickin’ lava on a critical hit!

The rings, rods, and wondrous items are where the real fun is at. Rings of Immortality, the Trident of Pressure, the Godly Vessel (trap the soul of a dead god inside, and when you wear it, you can grant spells and answer prayers as that god!) are all very fun items that are more what I think of when it comes to legendary gear. A brief section on scaling up normal magic items with varying bonuses (e.g. bracers of armor, cloaks of resistance, etc.) ends the section.

Overall, Legendary Levels is a good book, though not without its flaws. Its strength is clearly focused on the mechanics of taking the PCs above 20th level, and it does a surprisingly good job of it. From the de facto level thirty limit to the prestige classes and feats to help out multiclass and non-Core-class characters to its attempts to rein in spellcasters as it boosts martial characters, there’s a lot to admire here. However, the book does have some problems (overlooking the occasional spelling or grammar error), such as a lackluster skills section and an anemic section on legendary-level enemies.

Still, possibly notwithstanding the need for an expanded CR-to-XP table, none of its problems can’t be taken care of by an enterprising GM that knows what to exclude and what to prepare beforehand. Likewise, for players that want to extend their game beyond 20th-level, what’s here is invaluable, simply because it presents a framework that’s workable and fun. Legendary Levels gives you what you need to take your game into truly legendary territory. Just be sure to keep a close eye what needs to be tweaked, and you’ll have a lot of fun with what you find here.

I can’t tell you how long I’ve waited for this.

I think that at some point, every GM (and quite possibly every player too) has entertained the thought of running an evil campaign, or at least playing an evil character. After all, who could resist the temptation of being the uber-cool arch-villain, unbound by moral codes and social niceties, doing what you please and may the gods have mercy on those who cross you? Of course, this flight of fancy tends to run headfirst into some very real problems when put into practice, and so no one’s every really marketed an adventure – let alone an adventure path – for Pathinder (or its ancestor game).

That’s all changed with Fire Mountain Games’ new adventure path, Way of the Wicked. It all begins here with book one, Knot of Thorns.

Let’s cover some of the technical aspects of the book first. The single PDF file is exactly one hundred pages long, making it a fairly substantial work. Bookmarks are present, but only to each of the book’s major sections; you won’t find nested bookmarks to more specific parts of each section, so you may need to do a bit of scrolling.

The artwork in the book is notable for its quality; something all the more impressive for the book having had but a single artist. Each piece is a full-color illustration that is clearly professional in its detail; this is especially true for the maps, which I found to be quite pretty (and wished that there was a map pack available as well). My only complaint about the maps was that they use a scale of having one square equal 10 feet, which I always find slightly off-putting, since Pathfinder uses a default 5-foot square assumption. If you’re redrawing these, make sure to scale the locations appropriately.

The pages themselves are nicely decorated, being set against a dark background and having page borders on three sides. Having said that, there is no printer-friendly version of the book available (nor, for that matter, an epublishing version), so this may be a strain on your printer.

Following a single-page introduction where the author exhorts conquering the world rather than saving it, the adventure opens with a background for the course of the campaign. Set in the island nation of Talingarde, where the faith of the sun-god Mitra has become the state religion, a deposed prince turned worshipper of Asmodeus seeks to subvert the current order and have the Devil God’s faith ascend to become the religion of the kingdom, complete with a new king on the throne. For this, he has crafted a diabolical plan utilizing nine teams to create unrest and thwart attempts to solve the problems he’ll create. It’s with these teams in mind that he turns to your PCs.

The adventure starts out with your characters already being the bad guys. You’ve been found guilty of committing major crimes (not wrongly, either; your PCs being criminals is a major part of the backstory; see below) and sentenced to prison to be executed or sent to a life of hard labor. However, thanks to a mysterious benefactor, and a lax administration, you have a chance to escape.

This first part of the adventure is a fun prison break, not only for the heightened tension in that you’re working from a disadvantage (you don’t get to keep your gear in prison), but also due to the different angles from which this scenario can be run. Are you just trying to make for the exit as fast as you can, or do you take bloody revenge on everyone around you and arm yourself with their equipment?

Following their escape, the PCs make their way to their patron and are given the choice to swear themselves to Asmodeus (which, perhaps appropriately for a devil god, isn’t much of a choice at all) and begin their training. This part of the adventure is heavier on the role-playing, as this part introduces a lot of key NPCs and the chance to build relationships with them, along with internalizing the fact that they’re now serving the forces of Hell.

The adventure’s third act consists of a journey to their first assignment. A long sea voyage, this scenario is broken up by a number of encounters, which are broken up into three groups of making the voyage, completing their task, and after the trip. This is also the most open part of the adventure, as not only can the order of events be shuffled quite a bit, but new encounters can be added or deleted as necessary; this is where a lot of the restrictions on the PCs come off.

The fourth and final part of the adventure is a mission of infiltration and destruction. Outmatched and outnumbered, the PCs have to bring down a fortress filled with soldiers of the forces of goodness. Very cogently, the adventure adopts a method of granting “Victory Points” for various actions, with the end results of their mayhem being tabulated by how many points they’ve achieved via their acts of disruption.

That’s the end of the adventure, and if it sounds short, then it’s only because I’m doing it a disservice. There’s a lot that happens throughout Knot of Thorns, so much so that your characters are supposed to end the adventure when they’ve just reached 6th level. Interestingly, while there’s plenty of bloodshed going on throughout the book, a great deal of the XP the PCs are supposed to gain comes from story-based XP awards for accomplishing various tasks. I’d go so far as to say that I’ve never seen an adventure that relied so much on story awards. This is comforting, as it makes it easy to arbitrarily increase or decrease the XP the PCs are given as they move through the series of unfortunate events they’re causing.

The book doesn’t end with the adventure, however. The last twenty pages or so are devoted to what’s essentially a player’s primer. We’re given an overview of Talingarde’s history, some of its more notable locales, and a quick overview of some of its major organizations. It’s in this last section that I think we come to the book’s single biggest oversight – there’s no information on the sun god Mitra. To be fair, the church of Mitra is covered (albeit briefly), but that’s not enough. What are Mitra’s domains and sub-domains? What is his holy symbol and favored weapon? We don’t know, because the book doesn’t tell us. True, none of that information is directly pertinent, but if GMs want to deviate from the material here and make up their own Mitran clerics (or inquisitors or similar divine spellcasters), the missing information becomes more pertinent. Hopefully we’ll see something on this from Fire Mountain Games soon.

The author then includes a section on how to run a villainous campaign. Specifically, he outlines five problem areas, and how this campaign attempts to avoid them (where possible; otherwise he includes advice for making things go smoothly). This section was, to my mind, very cogent in its reasoning. I’d always held that the major problems of an evil game were PvP conflicts, and someone being so evil that it squicked out the other players. All of these, as well as other problems (“why can’t we just send minions to do our evil for us?”) are covered, with sound reasoning given for why and how to handle them.

Subsequently there’s a short guide on PCs in a Way of the Wicked campaign. Interestingly, goes through the character creation guidelines and recommends specific changes, the sum total of which are to make the PCs more powerful, since they’re evil outcasts in a good nation. I’m not sure that this is necessary, but then I’m slightly biased against increasing the level power the PCs have, since my group includes a couple power-gamers.

What’s most interesting here are the new campaign traits. Remember how the game starts with your PCs being condemned criminals? There are twenty campaign traits here, each of which is a crime – which trait you pick is the crime that you performed, and were caught and lawfully sentenced for. I was really impressed with this simple yet elegant way of bringing the characters background, and evil nature, into the spotlight. This serves as a brilliant method for highlighting what the PCs did to start them on the road to villainy, and why they throw in with the powers of darkness.

The book closes out with a two-page synopsis of the entire adventure path, outlining what happens in each of the six adventures.

Overall, I found myself very impressed with the opening act for Way of the Wicked; this promises to be an adventure path as epic as anything by Paizo. The campaign’s themes are tightly focused, and the tenor of the adventure steers away from the problems that usually come from having a group of evil characters. The challenges are diverse, from infiltration to puzzles to deception to combat. You’ve never seen such a good job of being the bad guy.

Of course, the book isn’t without its flaws. The CR for the triton oracle seems to be off, for example, and the tactics section of Father Donnagan’s stat block seems to be an incorrect cut-and-paste. But the major problem that I think people might have with this campaign is that, even more than other adventure paths, this one is an exercise in railroading.

The first two acts of the adventure basically force the PCs to go in the specified directions, and while the third act – as mentioned above – starts to loosen the tight grip around the characters, it’s never truly removed (though in many cases it’s less visible). The PCs are bound by the goals that are set for them; their only freedoms lie in how to accomplish them – to put it another way, they’re free to do what they want, so long as they want to do what their patron says. In theory they can go their own way, but the adventure talks about what to do if the PCs go off the rails at various points, and its never good (in some cases, it flat-out says that they get slaughtered).

Of course, that may very well be a necessary evil (pun intended) for an evil game, as it’s much easier for an evil game to fall apart. I certainly don’t think it’s a deal-breaker, as the adventure offers a great “us against the world” scenario that’s a great inversion of the usual “points of light” backdrop. Follow the Way of the Wicked, and be the darkness that snuffs out the light.

Riddle me this, dear reader: what’s the difference between something old, and something classic? I can’t quite describe it, but I suspect it’s one of those things where you know it when you see it. It’s that principle that makes Forgotten Foes, from Tricky Owlbear Publishing, such a great monster book – it’s a book of classic monsters brought up-to-date for the Pathfinder Role-Playing Game.

Of course, looking at the book’s pedigree, it’s kind of hard to imagine this book not being totally awesome. Written by Mark Gedak and Stefen Styrsky of the Grand OGL Wiki, with a stable of artists from Headless Hydra Games, and of course published through Tricky Owlbear, this book is at the center of a perfect storm of talent. It quite literally had to be just this good.

Just shy of two hundred pages long, Forgotten Foes brings over a hundred monsters to your Pathfinder game. I can’t quite say “new” monsters, because a significant majority of these creatures are ones who were mainstays of 3.5 who were subsequently abandoned during the Pathfinder changeover. Not all of these fall under that category, however, as there’s a handful that are from third-party 3.5 sources, also updated here. And I’m sure that a few totally new monsters are in here as well, though it’s difficult to be totally sure.

The book’s technical aspects do what they’re supposed to do. Full bookmarks are here, and the text allows for copying and pasting. Besides the front and back covers (which display some truly stunning pieces. I don’t know what that monster is on the front cover, but he’s one intimidating bastard), each monster has a black and white illustration (though shading is used far more often than not), something I was grateful for, since illustrations are very important for showcasing monsters. There’s also an alternating border on the side of the pages.

Most of the monsters in the book are given a single page all to themselves, though sometimes this rule is broken. Each has the usual combination of stat block and descriptive text, but as an added bonus there’s also a box showing what you learn about the creature on a specific Knowledge check; it’s one of those little extras that really make a difference. I should mention that the flavor text for the monsters is original, since in most cases the original source didn’t make that part Open Game Content to begin with.

One of the things that might not be obvious on the first read-through, it should be noted, is that the authors sometimes slipped in new additions or other changes to some monsters during the update to Pathfinder. The ravid, for example, now has some variants listed, in case you want a ravid that is more in tune with the life of nature and animates plants, for instance. Titans are mostly the same, but have the ability to assume the form of an elemental; an aspect of how, as near-divine beings, they’re connected to the primal elements of the universe. Little things like that are all over the place.

Of course, some things didn’t make the transition. The tojanida, for example, only has a single stat block, rather than three for younger and older incarnations of the creature. Similarly, it would have been nice to have seen variants on the half-dragon template for the sin dragons.

The book has several appendices, and while these cover the usual ways of breaking down the monsters (by type, by CR, etc.) there’s also a bit of new rules here as well. A new planar trait is given, in reference to a particular monster’s entry. Several new spells are presented, mostly because some monsters use them as spell-like abilities. Interestingly, ten pages are given reprinting the universal monster rules from the Pathfinder Bestiary. Presumably this was done for ease of reference.

Forgotten Foes is one of those books where, having read it, I’m honestly not sure how I was running a Pathfinder game without it. There’s so many monsters in here that were staples of 3.5, it’s shocking they haven’t been brought to Pathfinder before now – the bodak, the hellcat, the formians; it’s past due for them to make a comeback. Pick up Forgotten Foes and let your PCs know that the monsters that they once feared have followed them to Pathfinder.

Unfortunately, my review is too long for Paizo's space limits. Please check the discussion thread for my full review.

Underwater adventuring has always been, insofar as Pathfinder is concerned, one of those ideas that seem great in theory but difficult in practice. After all, taking your adventuring party underwater means that everyone’s aware that one good dispel magic will take away whatever spells or magic items they’re using to keep breathing. Add in penalties for how melee and ranged attacks work, changes to spellcasting, and even the continual Swim checks to keep moving, and it’s not only a headache for everyone involved, but quite likely a TPK waiting to happen. And don’t even get me started on the logistics of fighting across three dimensions of movement.

And so, underwater adventuring was quietly pushed off to the side. Just enough rules were provided to make it theoretically possible, without anyone worrying about how practical it actually was. Few adventures were published that dealt with characters going into the waves, and those that were kept it to the shallow end of the pool, with dry land always being close by. Finding new paths under the sea seemed like it’d always be resigned the realm of pipe-dreams and a few die-hards, never to be accessible to the mainstream Pathfinder gamers.

All of that changed when Alluria Publishing released Cerulean Seas, a massive campaign setting-slash-sourcebook that not only takes Pathfinder underwater, but actually makes such a game doable. Let’s take a look at what the book offers so that you’ll know this isn’t just a fish story I’m telling you.

As a PDF file, Cerulean Seas hits all of the high-water marks. It has full, nested bookmarks (an absolute necessity in a book that’s nearly 300 pages long), and allows for copy-and-pasting without problems. And of course, the artwork – oh wow, the artwork! Alluria has always had a reputation for their lavish illustrations, and they certainly live up to it here. An entire team of interior artists have lovingly portrayed myriad aspects of the book’s material, from new races and monsters to new equipment, to spell effects, to a map of the Cerulean Seas area, and so much more, (almost) all of it in lush full color. Alluria is perhaps the only company that can compete with Paizo on an even footing for how gorgeous their books look.

Of course, this (and the subtle but ornate page borders) means that this book is far from printer-friendly. At the time of this writing, a print version of the book is still in the works, but isn’t yet available. If you want a hardcopy of Cerulean Seas, you might be better to wait for that, as this PDF would likely send your printer to Davy Jones’ Locker.

The book’s opening chapter dives right in, opening with framing fiction that defines the game world. The Cerulean Seas campaign setting used to be a normal game world, but had a great flood that covered the world with ninety-nine percent water. There’s more to it than this, of course, including a recently-won genocidal war against the sahuagin, the role the gods played in the great flood, and more, but this is the main thrust of the story, and sets the stage for this water world.

The chapter takes us through some basic terms and definitions before we start to get into the specifics of living under the sea. It’s here that the book might start to scare away some of the more casual-type gamers, because this chapter pulls no punches in what it presents. We’re given an introduction to how things like buoyancy, hydraulic pressure, ambient sunlight, and more work underwater. The first chapter is basically a primer for things to be aware of regarding life underwater, and how these translate into game terms. This is especially true for underwater combat, which has its own section here.

I’ll take a moment to say that while this section can be off-putting for how dry (ironically) its listing of various undersea features can be, as well as how complicated the rules for buoyancy and the accompany combat changes are, it’s worth persevering through. The book deals with this more in the Game Mastering section, but these are the changes that really make an undersea game feel different; and as with all parts of a complex table-top game, they’ll become more familiar (to the point of being second-nature) over time.

The second chapter returns to more familiar territory where PF sourcebooks are concerned, presenting twelve new undersea races (though one or two, such as sea elves or the mogogols, may seem familiar). Cleverly, these are sub-divided into three groups: the anthromorphs (who have humanoid bodies), the feykith (fey-related sea-dwellers), and merfolk (who are humanoid from the waist up, and fish from the waist down). Interestingly, the human-equivalent race is presented as the “seafolk,” a merfolk race. They not only have the human’s “floating” +2 ability bonus that can be applied everywhere, but are the only race to have various cross-breeds listed, with alternate racial traits presented.

Each race received a generous focus, listing not only their statistics but also plenty of flavor text regarding their society, alignment, possible names, etc. However, ardent Pathfinder fans may be somewhat disappointed that the expanded racial options from the Advanced Player’s Guide aren’t reproduced here. That is, there are no alternate racial features available (seafolk crossbreeds notwithstanding) nor are there alternate favored class options.

I’m of two minds about this, as it seems somewhat unfair that these have suddenly been assumed to be default necessities for third-party contributions to the Pathfinder RPG. At the same time, those bring a hefty level of customization to the table that are very helpful in making your character’s race be of greater importance. That said, twelve colorful new races here certainly make that notable in and of themselves. It’s also worth noting that the book doesn’t forget to bring us the various vital statistics for these races (one of those little things that are nevertheless important).

Subsequent to the races chapter is the chapter on classes, and it’s here where things get truly interesting. The book makes some generalized notes about changes to existing classes before dealing with how to alter each base class specifically for an undersea game. This part of the book does deal with the APG classes, so you alchemists and oracles and such can all breathe a sigh a relief.

The changes made in this regard are absolutes, rather than the optional class archetypes presented in the APG. Interestingly, a few classes are recommended to be discarded entirely in favor of three new base classes presented here. Bards are passed over in favor of sirens, druids are replaced with kahunas, and rangers are given the boot in favor of mariners.

These new classes do a great job presenting their own twist on the niche that their replaced classes fill. The Kahuna, for example, is a full-progression divine spellcaster, but selects a single animal spirit that, as she gains levels, is able to utilize greater and greater spirit powers to bolster herself and her allies (or alternately harm her enemies).

This chapter also deals with prestige classes, listing which ones from the Core Rulebook and APG are useable without any changes, which need some changes, and which aren’t available at all. There are also three new prestige classes presented here, the each comber (those who venture into the wilds of the remaining dry land), glimmerkeeper (fast-moving undersea hero), and sea witch (an aquatic necromancer).

Skills and feats are the subject of the fourth chapter. As with many things, the skills section offers a series of new interpretations of existing skills, though there are no new skills added (something I was grateful for, as adding new skills often feels contrived). The feats section got a similar examination for several existing feats, but here we’re given almost four-dozen new underwater feats as well.

The chapter on money and equipment was interesting for how much stayed the same, though quite a bit changed in appearance. Most precious metals have been replaced by things like shells or pearls, though the measurements of currency are largely the same. New equipment helps there be a greater selection of viable weapons and armor underwater, not to mention various items that are unique to undersea adventuring, such as holy sand to replace holy water. Oddly, ships are presented here also, reinforcing that some aquatic races still spend a lot of their time above the waves.

The magic chapter presents some very imaginative alterations to not only existing spells, but also existing material components and foci before it moves into new spells and magic items. Some of what’s here deals with the change from fire damage to boiling-water damage, while others present alternate ways of harnessing electrical spells, or various utility spells such as defeating undersea pressure, or even breathing air for characters who want to go top-side.

It’s at the seventh chapter of the book that we take a look at the Cerulean Seas campaign world. This chapter takes a surprisingly light tone with the campaign, presenting many different facets of it but not going too deep with any of them, letting you fill in a lot of the blanks to make the game world your own. It does cover the recent histories and major NPCs of all of the major races, presents a number of major cities, a brief overview of the spoken languages, and an overview of the world’s recent history. My favorite, however, was the presentation of the Cerulean Seas religions. The undersea races uniformly decided to prevent religious strife by allowing only nine deities to be worshipped, one for each alignment. However, in order to sweep everyone under this umbrella, there are various “cults” that worship different aspects of these deities (each deity has two cults presented, with their own alignments, domains, etc.). These cults may only operate with the blessing of the parent faith, and it was engrossing to read about how various races merged their native religions with that of a more dominant faith, often resulting in the major god literally consuming the smaller one as a consequence.

I don’t mind saying that chapter eight, the Game Mastering Chapter, was perhaps the most friendly and helpful such section I’ve ever read. It speaks frankly, and almost familiarly, about the problems with running an undersea game, and what to do about them. Remember those scary new rules from chapter one? It goes over what the most important are to get down pat and how to ease into them. We get general guidelines on converting other materials for an undersea game, whether in terms of buoyancy or pressure tolerance. But my favorite section here was the unabashed look at the problem of 3D combat.

The book outlines roughly a half-dozen options for what to do about this issue, ranging from buying commercial elevation trackers to ordering a pizza and using those little plastic things that keep the cheese off of the box to elevate your minis. But by far the most favored option it presents is the one where it walks you, step by step, through creating your own adjustable boards for elevation. These are basically a few square inches of hard foam boarding that are moved up and down a standing rod; add a half-dozen of them to your game table and you can easily simulate characters moving across every dimension. It’s a fun little project, and works great for any tabletop game that needs a 3D combat solution.

There’s also a fascinating section on the planar arrangement (or perhaps just the widespread belief in the arrangement) of this campaign world. After all, an undersea culture hardly believes in a plane of fire, especially one that stands equal to the plane of water! Likewise, the oceans of the outer planes are considered much more prominent than the dry areas of such realms.

The final full chapter of the book presents almost a hundred new monsters to help populate your undersea game. From aquatic familiars to a large selection of new giants and true dragons (which are given their own grouping, rather than being chromatic or metallic), there’s plenty here to round out an underwater bestiary. New selections of simple templates and guidelines on how the major creature types work underwater provide further options and guidelines.

The book closes out with a number of helpful aids, such as a consolidated list of undersea monsters from this book, the Pathfinder Bestiary, and Alluria’s other Pathfinder books. Add in a pronunciation guide, cardstock minis, a character sheet, and more, and there’s everything you’ll need to get started on your Cerulean Seas game right away.

And if you’re not already excited about using this book to run an underwater game after reading this review, then trust me: it’s more due to my descriptions lacking enough fidelity to the book’s accomplishments than anything else. Cerulean Seas not only looks at every aspect of running a game in an underwater world – from what it means to be submerged to the logistics of it at the game table – but presents holistic options and alterations for setting a Pathfinder game there. The new material is expansive and the campaign setting covers a wide range of topics while still leaving room for customization. And of course, the artwork is beautiful and prominent. This is easily one of the best Pathfinder books to come out of the third-party market, and the absolute best for the topic it covers.

Don’t be afraid to make your game better by taking it down where it’s wetter. Bring your characters to the Cerulean Seas; it’ll make a big splash amongst your gaming group.

I really don’t know where the current zeitgeist of “werewolves vs. vampires” came from, but lately it’s been everywhere. From the Underworld movies to Twilight, the two somehow seem to have become natural enemies, or at least counterparts. Given that, it’s somewhat appropriate that Necromancers of the Northwest – whose Liber Vampyr sourcebook made vampires into playable characters in Pathfinder – should release A Necromancer’s Grimoire: Marchen der Daemonwulf, which makes werewolves into a PC choice in your Pathfinder game.

Looking at this book’s technical merits, it does rather well for itself. The product has full, nested bookmarks, and the text is selectable. However, copy and paste has been turned off, which is a rather unpleasant surprise. Hopefully this will be addressed in an update.

The book’s visual design plays into the title’s theme. All of the pages are set against a cream-color background, as though written on old parchment. There are only three illustrations in the book, but they’re done in a very evocative style and contain hyperlinks to the page of the artists, which I found to be a great way of acknowledging the people who helped illustrate the book.

But what does this book actually offer for people who want to play a werewolf character? First, it should be made absolutely clear that this book is for would-be wolves only; other lycanthropes need not apply. Now, you could certainly reskin this book to deal with other sorts of were-creatures, but as written it’s all about the lupines.

The book opens with a foreword discussing where the idea came from and its evolution to fit the Necromancers of the Northwest’s style of smaller releases. This was rather telling, since the book does narrow its focus considerably from its vampiric counterpart. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, since unlike that book this one is a pay-for-download product, but still, it’s something else to know that they could have added more but chose not to.

The book begins by introducing us to the lycaonite base class. This class is not only heavily invested in offering bonus werewolf feats (see below) to help flesh out your werewolf character concept, it also presents an escalating series of mechanics based around offering bonuses or penalties to various stats depending on the phases of the moon. I suspect that some players and GM’s will be put off by the idea that a PCs bonuses can fluctuate (heavily so as the class levels up) due to events beyond the character’s control, but this is addressed in sidebars and a surprisingly frank discussion about using the class in the game. If nothing else, the book is very open about the challenges of using this class, and offering some alternative ways of utilizing it.

One thing I would have liked to have seen more of, though I can’t hold this against the book considering the attention given to keeping it on the lean side, was new options matching what was in the Advanced Player’s Guide. Werewolf traits, for example, or class archetypes for the lycaonite (perhaps that would have been a good way to work in alternate lycanthropes?) would have been welcome.

The bulk of Marchen der Daemonwulf, however, is devoted to its werewolf feats. Weighing in at fifty-five feats, the design philosophy here is told to us outright: that you can take whatever combination of feats lets you build the werewolf you want. And make no mistake, there are a lot of options. Several feat “trees” are presented, such as an escalating series of feats around gaining power from devouring corpses (you gain extra power if it’s the corpse of a sentient creature) or around becoming a leader of wolves. Others are stand-alone feats, such as improving your ability to transform, or gaining fast healing at night.

A half-dozen new magic items round out the book. Two are magic weapon properties, while the other four are wondrous items. I was a little surprised by this section, as it seemed rather anemic and thus against the philosophy of keeping the book narrowly focused; only here are things that can be used against werewolves, as opposed to playing one (though there are some beneficial magic items here too).

Overall, Marchen der Daemonwulf does a superb job of making werewolves an option for PCs. By using feats to grant werewolf powers, along with a class that maximizes not only how many feats you can gain but also introduces lunar abilities, playing a shapeshifting lycanthrope is made into a viable and interesting choice for players. Though the book has some issues, such as the uncopyable text or the sparse magic items, none of these are enough to hurt its focus. If you’ve always wanted to play a werewolf character, then you have cause to howl in joy with the release of Marchen der Daemonwulf.

Cthentacle, I’ve learned from experience, is one of those games where everybody looks at you funny when you suggest a game of it. After all, most people would think it odd that you’d want to play (and want them to play) a card game based around tentacle-rape. This is only compounded if you mention that you’ve also got the expansion sets for the game. But you know what? If you’re going to pull out something this nasty and perverted, you might as well go all the way (innuendos intended). It’s with that thought that we turn to the second Cthentacle expansion: At the Mountings of Madness.

Like the previous expansion (The Dunb~%+& Horror), At the Mountings of Madness introduces two new characters and twenty new cards, along with the generic card-backs. There’s even a scenario behind this expansion to the game, though it’s little more than “an explorer and her sailor companion set out for the Antarctic to see what they can find.” Of course, what they find are some ancient and horny Mythos monsters.

The cards have a fairly even distribution of number cards (which range from 1 to 5) along with some new ! and SP cards. However, I’m still frowning over the uneven distribution of cards. It was perhaps inevitable, given that there are seven card types (note that I’m not counting character cards) and twenty cards in the set. Still, the staggered number of card types means that playing some number cards will be more difficult since you must play them sequentially and there’s less of some numbers than others.

One interesting tidbit to the game is a variation on normal Cthentacle play called Investigation. In this version, there are six “locations” (which the game says you should just lay out some sort of markers to represent) and your goal is to have your character advance through them to the final destination, which is the lost city of O RLYEH. The method of advancement requires you to give up a card, but otherwise this plays much like normal Cthentacle, with numbered cards played on your character until your “spooged,” though this doesn’t disqualify you but rather sends you back to the starting location.

I was a bit disappointed to see that this expansion pack didn’t take into account the cards from the previous expansion that required some explanation. Some of the cards in The Dunb*#&# Horror required explanation for ambiguous powers like “works on humanoid-looking cards.” That expansion listed explicitly what cards in it and the base game phrases like that referred to – a further listing should have been provided for this set so that things stayed clear.

Of course, for all these minor flaws, this expansion pack stays eminently true to the dark eros of Cthentacle. Artist Darkzel continues to draw full-color artwork for all of the cards, showing the lovely ladies (and oftentimes other things) in situations ranging from bending over provocatively to being bound and violated by tentacled horrors. It’s great stuff, in other words, and almost distracts from the awful card names; if you’re a Lovecraft fan, you’ll roll your eyes at titles like “Pnacocktic Manuscripts” and other bad jokes. It all just goes to show that Cthentacle has still got it, so whip out your deck and get to the Mountings of Madness!

In an age where the Cthulhu Mythos has been figuratively perverted, mostly with plushy dolls and sing-a-long CDs, Cthentacle was the game that took that perversion literally, making HPL’s creation into an erotic and disturbing card game – so naturally, I very much enjoyed it. Imagine my shock and twisted delight when, like a deviant coming back to prey on his one-time victim again, Postmortem Studios released an expansion to Cthentacle, entitled The Dunb+~~! Horror.

Now, first things first here: I’m honestly surprised they went with a name as tame as that. I would have thought it’d be called something like “The Dumb-B*~*@ Whore.” But I suppose that’d move a bit too far away from the source material that it’s parodying to be immediately obvious…this marks the only time I can think of that any part of Cthentacle shows restraint.

I was surprised to find that, unlike the main Cthentacle game, The Dunb##!% Horror expansion actually has a story behind it. The PDF opens with a half-page of text about the town of Dunb~&!*, and the two residents who are added characters to the Cthentacle game: the groan-worthy-named BJ and (Sheriff) Cooter. Both are residents of the town of Dunb@$@!, and both are mixed up in the town’s darker side, which ultimately puts them on a path for the lusty horror that the set is named after. That’s the scenario behind this expansion pack.

…you’ll notice that I never said the story was a good one.

Anyway, the set introduces two character cards for the aforementioned girls; like in the original Cthentacle, both are double-sided, having one for the girl starting out, and one after being thoroughly violated by Mythos monsters. Beyond that, there are twenty new cards here for use in Cthentacle, expanding the game by almost a third-again. Specifically, there are five “!” cards, four 1 cards, three 2 cards, two 3 cards, three 4 cards, two 5 cards, and one SP card. There are also eight generic card-backs.

The above leads me to my only complaint about the game – how the number cards are staggered. The original Cthentacle had exactly eight of each type; this changes how many cards of each kind there are, meaning that some will be rarer than others. This isn’t really a problem, but it’s a bit annoying to think that there are now more 4 cards than 3 cards, when all of the number cards must be played subsequently. Likewise, you’re now more likely to draw – all things being equal – a “!” card than any other kind, even though the point is to play number cards on the other players. Of course, this is an altogether minor complaint, so given that it’s my only one, that should let you know that this is a very worthy expansion to the original Cthentacle.

Having said all of that, I can’t not mention the artwork. Original Cthentacle artist Darkzel returns for this set, keeping the same great cartoony-yet-erotic look as the main game. All of the cards here feature the two new heroines, from being in slightly suggestive situations to fighting back against the monsters to full-on copulating with strange and unnatural creatures. Needless to say, you’d never know this wasn’t an original part of the game.

It’s worth noting that there are no new rules here, per se. The card types are the same, with no new mechanics being introduced. There are, however, explanations of some of the cards in this set. A few have mechanics that could be dubiously interpreted, such as how the “In the Ghoulies” card works on “male humanoid looking” cards; as such, the rules section at the beginning of the PDF expressly lays out what cards – both from the original game and this set – that that and other such cards work on, eliminating any such ambiguity. That’s a nice plus, since I’ve been in heated arguments with people over how to correctly interpret rules in a card game, and it’s not something I care to repeat.

All in all, it should be pretty clear that I quite liked The Dunb&*~* Horror expansion. These extra cards fit in perfectly with the original Cthentacle game, keeping the same art style and not introducing any rules that weren’t already there. I wish that the new cards it introduced were all in the same quantities, but that’s not a big deal. So, if you’re already playing Cthentacle, turn up the perversity a bit more by letting The Dunb+#$* Horror run loose in your game.

It’s a good thing that H. P. Lovecraft is already dead (notwithstanding the strange aeons), because if he ever saw Cthentacle, and how it quite literally perverted his Mythos, he would have been driven stark raving mad, probably unto suicide, in a manner not unlike most of his literary protagonists. Of course, being the sort of guy he was, I imagine that’s how Howard would have wanted to go.

The above was my first thought upon looking over the Cthentacle card game, from Postmortem Studios.

Cthentacle is the sort of card game you play when nudie decks alone aren’t enough. No, in this game, each player has a female character, and the object of the game is to have the Great Old Ones violate the other characters until they’re incapacitated. The last girl standing (or rather, still dressed and with some scrap of dignity) wins. Needless to say I really wish I’d had this card game during my best friend’s bachelor party a while back.

The manner of play is fairly simple and very easy to learn. Each character has a character card (being one of six possible girls), which is double-sided with an image of the girl clothed and poised; the flipside is that same girl naked and post-tentacle-violated. The way game-play works is players go in turns, with each person taking a card from the draw pile, and subsequently playing one card on their turn. Most of the cards are number cards, with values ranging from 1 to 5. In order to drive another player out, the character card needs to have sequential number cards played on it (that is, it needs to have a 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 card all played on it). Once the 5 card is played on it, the girl card is flipped over to her post-coital image, and that player is out.

Of course, if that was all there was to the game it’d be fairly boring, hence the two other types of cards, both of which have special effects, unlike number cards. SP cards can be played in lieu of a number card; these usually have some sort of continuous effect, such as letting you draw a second card each turn, or can be activated later to change something. Opposite those are ! cards (yes, that’s an exclamation point) which can be played at any time, even during another player’s turn.

Not counting the character cards, there are forty number cards (eight of each number), eight SP cards, and eight ! cards, for a total deck size of fifty-six, making for enough cards that games should be sufficiently different each time you play. There are also card-sized copies of the rules, and card-backs.

Of course, the actual play mechanics probably aren’t going to be what gets your attention at first. Rather, it’s all about the pictures! Illustrated by the artist known Darkzel, every card is in full color, and revels in perversity. The pictures are slightly cartoonish, but I suspect that’s purposeful given the less-than-serious nature of the cards. For example, each card has a title, such as “O R’LEYH?” or “Great Race of Yiff,” and corresponding picture. It’s worth noting that, for the number cards, each card shows one of the girls from the character cards, and as the numbers get higher, the girls get into more and more erotic situations. For example, on the 1 card “Interesting Reading” the girl is blushing as she looks at an open book, whereas the 4 card “Horndog of Tindalos” shows another girl having sex with the mostly-shapeless monster. Most of the ! cards are of the girls also, whereas the SP cards show other characters or items.

Ultimately, the hardest part of reviewing Cthentacle was trying to decide if it’s more fun to look at, or to play. The actual game itself is quite sound and engaging, but the over-the-top raunchy pictures are what really make it worthwhile. Considering the grandiose and self-serious nature of most post-modern card games (particularly the collectible ones) it’s quite fun to play a nonsensical game about tentacles molesting women – a not-so-subtle jab at the standard tropes of summoning monsters or drawing mana. Presuming it won’t offend anyone’s sensibilities (which is a fairly big presumption here), I heartily recommend introducing Cthentacle to your friends; it puts the “cool” back in “tentacool.”

I should admit straight-up that I was a bit biased in regards to this product. As a student of Japanese culture, I was naturally intrigued when the Prelude to the Faerie Ring products noted that kitsune and yokai were among the fey it’d be covering. And when the next in that series, Along the Twisting Way #2: Red Jack, came out, that turned into full-blown eagerness. But what sort of presentation did the book make? Let’s find out.

Two-dozen pages in length, Along the Twisting Way #2 makes a strong showing of itself in terms of technical presentation. Presented with full, nested bookmarks and with the copy-and-paste on, the book hits all of the high-water marks. Much more notable, however, is the imagery. Presented on a light bluish background, the book only had four illustrations, but they were spectacular. I say this even with one of those being the cover illustration again, and another being reused from Along the Twisting Way Prelude. Julie Dillon’s artwork is just that vibrant.

Turning to the book itself, I was surprised by just how much Zombie Sky Press was able to squeeze into twenty-four pages. The book opens with Red Jack’s background and current sketch, before talking about his domain (with a sidebar noting its planar traits) and its major features (which also has a sidebar on a new major artifact, the Murder Stone).

Following this is an unexpectedly lengthy discussion about kitsune, and some subtypes of kitsune, before talking about Red Jack’s daughter, Ren. At this point we’re just over halfway through the book and it’s been almost entirely flavor text with little in the way of game stats. While I’m usually a bit of a curmudgeon about that, here I confess that I was captivated by the writing. There’s a style in this book that seems to suggest that it’s presenting only a piece of a larger whole, but feels no need to give additional details (though in several places it does make reference to where further information may be found).

It also helps that the second half of the book (noted as appendices I and II) is where the game stats come out in full force. In appendix one we get the stat block for Red Jack, who is a walloping CR 27, making him one of the highest-CR’d creatures for the Pathfinder RPG to date (notwithstanding v.3.5 material).

Following this is a sidebar discussing how fey lords of Jack’s type have a singular item, a memento mori, that gives them greater power. After this is the stat block for Red Jack if his memento mori is lost or destroyed, busting him down to CR 23. This part of the book made me frown a bit, simply because the jump from CR 27 to 23 is comparatively small, as are the tweaks to his stat block that make up this drop in power. While I can certainly understand the utility of having fully-formed stat blocks for each version of Jack, I wonder if it wouldn’t have been more economical to just list the changes made if his memento mori is lost (or have his power be reduced to a point where an alternate stat block was more necessary, like CR 21), since there was a lot of repeated text. Of course, this is a PDF, so space isn’t really a concern anyway.

After a listing for Jack’s personal major artifact (something to which I tip my hat to the author; it’s been too long since writers remembered that unique, powerful individuals should have unique, powerful artifacts) we move on to stats for kitsune.

The three types of kitsune – the normal kitsune, the ghost fox, and the pipe fox – are all presented here. Except, not really. Rather, we’re given a ghost fox NPC (since ghost fox is a kitsune-specific template given immediately after this), a kitsune NPC (since they’re a playable race), and generic stats for the pipe fox (which, to my delight, can be taken as improved familiars) and their elder variant. A sidebar discussing several new subtypes that kitsune have closes out appendix one.

Appendix two is PC-related information, in regards to the kitsune. After basic PC race stats (which include the method whereby the gain more tails), we’re presented with a series of feats that allow for different uses of fox magic. I liked this section, but it was too short by half (and it noted that these weren’t all the fox magic that there were); mostly absent were fox magic feats designed for having multiple tails (that is, being higher level). Hopefully there’ll be more in a future supplement of web enhancement.

Some discussion is given to a uniquely kitsune magic item, the star ball. It’s interesting that the star ball is designed to allow kitsune (which in their natural form have no opposable thumbs) to utilize magic items they otherwise couldn’t, since they can imbue their star ball with those items (using a new spell presented here). However, the basic construction information for how a star ball is made wasn’t presented here. A minor oversight, to be sure, but it would have been useful. The book closes out with an incantation that allows a kitsune to, upon a success, possess someone for a short while (something I’d keep out of the hands of a PC, even despite its built-in limitations).

Overall though, I greatly enjoyed this product. The references to Japanese mythology alone (particularly the story of Tamamo-no-Mae, which the author acknowledges and gives a surprising twist on) were enough to win me over. But even had they not been, the engaging writing and excellent new mechanics would have. Red Jack is a powerful foe who has long arms thanks to those kitsune who serve him, and with his wily daughter out there, there’s a built-in campaign waiting to happen, especially if you have PCs who want to play a kitsune.

The only real complaint I have about the book was that it was much too short. The section on new material for PCs could easily have been twice as long (more fox magic feats, stats for human-kitsune children, etc). And though I thought Red Jack’s two forms could have used more distinction, the character himself was truly epic (pun intended). If you’re looking for a method to add fey foxes to your game, look no further. The Faerie Ring: Along the Twisting Way #2 – Red Jack gives you a fox-faced foe you won’t soon forget, and all that he en-tails.

The most flavorful class to come out of the Advanced Player’s Guide is, in my opinion, the witch. With hex powers and a familiar that’s more than window dressing, along with the rather spooky theme about their patron granting them power, the witch just oozes flavor. And yet, for all the APG offers in this regard, there are other aspects of the classical witch that are largely ignored. Very little is given, for example, to the idea of the witch coven, or how hags interact with that; what is given is brief and somewhat unsatisfying.

Who better to “raise” these issues than the Necromancers of the Northwest, in their witch-themed sourcebook A Necromancer’s Grimoire: Secrets of the Witch.

Secrets of the Witch aims squarely to round out the themes of the witch class that were overlooked in the APG, and in that regard it succeeds magnificently, focusing its attention on five key areas: hags as a PC class/race, coven abilities (as feats), new hexes, new abilities for familiars, and new spells designed to take advantage of covens.

Unfortunately, I can’t be quite so complimentary on the technical side of things. Now, the book does do most things right; it has a screen version and printer-friendly version, both of which contain full nested bookmarks. The screen version is also nicely illustrated, with the pages being set on a parchment-colored background, and every so often a full-color image (usually of a macabre nature) will appear. The problem comes with the copy-and-paste. While large sections of the book copy and paste just fine, there are some areas – areas where the text has a slight but noticeable blur – where the copy and paste won’t work cleanly, with some words being replaced with odd symbols and characters. It’s a persistent problem in Necromancers of the Northwest products, though it does seem somewhat diminished here.

Having said that, let’s examine the book’s content in further detail.

The first section of the book gives us the green hag racial class. For those not familiar with the concept, this is where a race is broken down into a series of class levels, basically combining class and race and spreading the latter’s powers out among the former. What’s different here (though if you’re a fan of the NotNW website, you’ll have seen this treatment for other races) is that while you can usually become a “full” – that is, Bestiary equivalent member of the normal race – green hag at 11th level, this class is extended all the way to 20th level, with new powers enhancing those commonly associated with these monsters.

And there’s little doubt that green hags are monsters. The book helpfully provides a large fluff section on green hags in the game world and green hag PCs, and the tone holds that green hags are monsters and everyone knows it. This is true, but I was surprised that they didn’t devote more time to those rare hags that weren’t stereotypical villains, since PC green hags will likely not be evil. As it is, the green hags as PCs section talks more about the mechanical balance of this class, which is helpful too.

The feats section of the book follows, and this is where covens are spotlighted. Characters that take the basic Coven Initiate feat – open to all arcane spellcasters (with a sidebar noting that certain creatures and classes may naturally have access to this feat) – are able to, when together, able to cast a select number of spells simply by virtue of being a coven. A generous helping of feats expand on this in a variety of ways. Beyond that, several other feats don’t require coven abilities, but instead focus on witch-like powers (my favorite here was witch-specific feat called Blessing of the Three, whose bonus changes depending on your age category in the vein of the Maiden/Mother/Crone trinity).

The hexes section is fairly slim (four new standard hexes, three new major hexes, and two new grand hexes) but again, the flavor of what’s here makes up for that. A hex to fly so long as the witch is riding a broom or similar object, for example. I won’t give any more away, but beware angering the witch with the Form of the Three hex!

Alternate familiar abilities are one of those ideas that seems so obvious it’s amazing no one’s thought of it before. These are like alternate class abilities in that you have a series of powers that replace one of the normal abilities you gain for your familiar as you level up. Instead of speaking with animals of its kind, for example, you familiar can learn how to vocalize a particular language. It’s simplicity itself, and is one of the most elegant ways to diversify familiars, since it requires neither precious feat slots nor temporary spells.

Lastly are the thirty new spells mentioned in the book’s product page. Given on the witch spell list (though many can be cast by other classes), almost all of these spells can be used by a single spellcaster…but that’s not where their real value lies. These spells also have the new ritual descriptor, which means that when cast with the aid of a coven, they have an enhanced effect depending on how many others are lending their power to the spell. For example, the Dread Calling spell calls an outsider (with no restrictions on it) of up to ½ the caster’s spellcaster level. However, if your coven ritual-casts this spell with you, that limit is lifted to ½ the total caster level of all those joining you in the casting.

Some of the best sourcebooks I’ve ever seen are those that serve a specific niche, but make sure to keep a wider applicability in doing so; Secrets of the Witch is one of those sourcebooks. Its material is tightly focused on the witch class, both in theme and mechanics, but almost all of the book can be used for other characters. Your green hag PC doesn’t have to be a witch, for example, and the alternate familiar abilities can be used by any character with a familiar. This book makes your witch more quintessential, or your other arcane spellcaster a little more witchy in presentation. Pick this book up and show the rest of your group just which witch is which.

There’s an old saying – “simple is best.” That’s an approach that’s usually approached with wariness by gamers when it comes to RPG books. After all, we’re usually happier when there are big production values and expansive coverage on a given topic. Products like Oracle Curses, however, the debut product from Above Average Creations, showcase how with good writing and a few select illustrations, a product with a minimalist approach can still produce top-quality results.

Oracle Curses presents, appropriately enough, ten new curses for the oracle class from the Pathfinder Advanced Player’s Guide. The author, cogently noting that the mere six curses were far too few, presents another ten curses here. Interestingly, virtually all of these are curses of personality rather than physical problems.

What I found far more intriguing, however, was the author’s bold admittance that these curses were more to create strong role-playing opportunities than wow us with new rules’ crunch. Of course, that should be true across the board, but by focusing on curses that manifest as quirks of behavior, this is maximized. Moreover, there’s a helpful chart of the ten curses (with a note saying that you can roll randomly for your curse – something I found delightful; really, should a curse be something you choose for yourself?), and notes about their “type” (if they’re physical, mental, etc.) and how “strong” they are (how much they affect the character laboring under them).

The curses themselves are as imaginative as the author clearly wants them to be, ranging from being mute to being too famous for your own good, and more. While all function well mechanically (though to different degrees – taking a skill penalty is one thing, taking bleed damage with every attack is quite another), it’s the notations after them that are what really make this product.

Like all gamers, I enjoy being given glimpses behind the proverbial curtain. In this case, after each curse, there’s a paragraph wherein the author talks to the reader directly; while for a few of the curses he discusses the impact of them in the course of the game (such as how to deal with an oracle that’s mute), most focus on different ways of having the curse manifest in-game. For example, are you a hermit because you’re just a socially awkward, or were you raised by wolves, literally? The virtue of these sections is that they break you out of the more rigid thinking suggested by the curses themselves, reminding you that you can easily reskin many of these to allow for a broader characterization.

From a technical standpoint, the book has little to present, but what it has it presents well. The artwork is all historical pieces that are reused here (with a notation on where to find them and more online on the book’s credits page). There are no bookmarks, but in an eight-page book, that’s not really an indictment.

Unfortunately, the book is not without its share of problems. These aren’t faults of the content (though be warned, one curse does draw on some of the material in the GameMastery Guide, though that’s in the Pathfinder SRD now anyway), but of the book’s technical presentation. To be more specific: copy-and-paste doesn’t work the way it should – the words are copied in columns rather than lines. Likewise, there’s no declaration of Product Identity or Open Game Content; and the OGL Section 15 doesn’t list the Advanced Player’s Guide or GameMastery Guide.

Of course, these are problems with virtually no practical impact when it comes to using this book in your game. If you’re planning on playing an oracle, do yourself a favor and spend a dollar to pick up this product. The material here is as inspiring as it is expertly-presented, and gives some much-needed breadth to the curse of the oracle class. Unfortunately, Above Average Creations may need to change their name, since if this first book is any indication, their creations are excellent.

It’s never been said (insofar as I’m aware) but I’m of the opinion that the otyugh was created either to fill an ecological niche in the game world (as to what cleans up the poo of dungeon-dwelling monsters) or as a nasty surprise when the PCs actually stop to go to the bathroom. Either way, they seemed like a monster that was fairly one-dimensional for what they offered. Mark Gedak and Stefen Styrsky, however, are determined to prove otherwise with their Otyughnomicon series of releases. In this case, we look at the Northern Waste Otyugh.

This book is a short one, being eight pages long (albeit with a six-page OGL listing, thoughtfully included as a separate file). Despite its brevity, full nested bookmarks are present, and copy-and-paste is enabled. There’s only one illustration here, a black and white picture of an icy otyugh, but the pages have a light tentacle in the background, and there are tokens of said otyugh (and, somewhat oddly, a polar bear).

After a quick introduction, the book tackles a topic that’s clearly dear to the authors’ hearts – should the otyugh be an aberration, or a magical beast? The rules say the former, while the authors clearly think the latter. As such, the first sample otyugh for the template (see below) is reproduced twice, once as an aberration otyugh, and once as a magical beast otyugh – all further otyughs in the book are magical beasts.

In all honesty, I don’t necessarily disagree with the reasoning given in this book, but I think that there’s something of a missed opportunity here. If you’re writing your own version of something you disagree with, you should introduce it in-game as something new! Perhaps the magical beast otyughs are a new breed that are edging out their aberration forefathers (in that case, you could even call them…neo-otyughs).

Following this is the new Northern Waste Creature template. It’s a fairly simplistic template (though not a simple template, in Pathfinder parliance), and does a good job of making a creature into an arctic counterpart, though I question the decision not to add the cold subtype.

After the two sample otyughs (and a new variant disease, frost fever, to offset the usual filth fever), we then get a sample tribe of northern waste otyughs – only the two leaders are outlined, as most of the tribe are typical specimens, whereas the leaders have class levels. I wish some attempt, no matter how small, had been made to give us some flavor text about these individuals, as they’re presented only as stat blocks. Another missed opportunity.

Six new icy-themed spells are provided then, though the majority of these seem to be cold variants of existing spells (e.g. hibernate instead of sleep, ice shape instead of stone shape, etc.). I don’t necessarily dislike spells that are variants of other spells, and these did a fairly good job differentiating themselves. But it was the next section that was magical.

The authors note that one of their fans made, on their facebook page, a comment about the sex lives of otyughs. Would that that fan had remained silent, and we’d have been spared the thought of what sort of union would produce the otyugh sorcerer bloodline. The bloodline is just as disgusting as its parentage, and I foresee some truly nauseating villains using it (as well as some gross PCs). Several new spells are presented as part of the bloodline spells, and these were much more inspiring. Spells to curse the land (with disease, undead, etc.), make a creature a disease carrier, or even cause an epidemic, are very much in the theme of the otyugh.

Overall, this is a good book if you’re a fan of the otyugh, but it could have been more. What’s here is solid work, but a little more polish could have made it great. Who are these northern waste otyugh leaders? What makes aberration otyughs different from magical beast otyughs? Still, these oversights don’t diminish what’s here, which are some great options for icy otyughs and those of otyugh ancestry. Pick this book up, and let these otyughs give your PCs all sorts of crap to deal with!

Rakshasas are one of those foes that work much better outside of a purely combat-focused scenario, I always thought. More than anything, they seem like scheming manipulators, being more inclined to extort, blackmail, and otherwise make others do their bidding without ever having to spill any blood. Despite their monstrous nature, that level of subterfuge can be tempting to a PC who wants to run the same sort of character. With the release of A Necromancer’s Grimoire: Faces of the Rakshasa, that path is now open to PCs everywhere.

Faces of the Rakshasa comes in two PDFs. The first is the full book itself, and the second is its printer-friendly counterpart. While I applaud the Necromancers of the Northwest for including a printer-friendly version at all – something that gets ignored all too often – its implementation here is imperfect. For one thing, the color cover is kept, as are all of the interior illustrations. What’s changed here is that the full version sets the background to a cream-colored parchment look, whereas the printer-friendly version is set on a while background.

Both files include full nested bookmarks, which is handy. However, the Necromancers still don’t seem to have licked that problem with copy-and-paste. The printer-friendly file doesn’t have it at all, whereas the main file does, but the pasted result has weird symbols and characters, resulting in a copy whose usefulness is limited at best.

After an opening piece of fiction that does an adequate job displaying the evil narcissism of a rakshasa, the book can be largely divided into three sections. The first deals with the rakshasa PC class.

A sidebar covers the basics of how this works, but what’s basically here is a 20-level base class designed to emulate the powers of a standard rakshasa from the Bestiary. Note that it achieves this in about fourteen levels; the remaining six levels add new powers to better make your rakshasa a paragon among its kind.

The second portion of the book is devoted to dealing with rakshasas in society, which spends a good deal of time talking about how to play a rakshasa PC. There’s some good advice here, talking about what to do with a PC that has mad powers to read minds, and also how rakshasas are typically evil creatures. However, I wish at least some time had been devoted to talking about how to play a creature that clearly looks inhuman (with their animal head and all). The rakshasa PC does get some disguise-based ability, but not right from the get-go, and it takes several levels before they can permanently disguised. This is something that should have been dealt with more.

The final part of the book is a bestiary of nine new rakshasas. Ranked in ascending CR, each is given an impressive amount of discussion for their tactics and their caste – this latter idea is one that’s explored more heavily in the book’s previous section, discussing how each rakshasa reflects a various form of sin among mortals, whether lust, greed, sadism, etc.

My major complaint with this section wasn’t about anything that was here, but because it makes the rakshasa PC racial class seem somewhat rigid in comparison. That class will let you advance as a standard Bestiary rakshasa, but what if you want to play as a sadistic makari rakshasa instead? There’s no support for that, and it’s disappointing – this would have been a good place for archetypes to come into play. Hopefully a further supplement will expand on this.

Overall, Faces of the Rakshasa does a lot for these classic foes. It gives depth and coverage to how they function in the game world that you won’t find anywhere else. The nine new rakshasa do an excellent job of fleshing out the myriad forms that these creatures can manifest in, and the addition of a rakshasa PC racial class is excellent for those who want to take a walk on the dark side. It’s unfortunate that the lack of expanded materials, and a few technical failings, hold this product back from being a five-star book, because the potential is clearly there. Hopefully we’ll see another face to these rakshasas to round things out.

Unfortunately, my review is too long for Paizo's space limits. Please check the discussion thread for my full review.

My review of the original Warfare for Beginners noted that that product’s strength came from how it eschewed the idea of simulating the actual clash of armies, instead setting the large-scale battles as a backdrop against which the PCs undertook decisive missions which made the difference between victory and defeat. It was a great idea, as it got rid of special rules for playing armies without sacrificing the “feel” of your characters being involved in a major military conflict.

It’s a pity that Warfare for Beginners 2 breaks so thoroughly from its predecessor, even as it depends on it.

At one page shorter than the previous book in the series – having two pages of text and one of the OGL – Warfare for Beginners 2 is, for all intents and purposes, a completely different article from the one it follows. So much so, in fact, that I look askance at this book’s disclaimer of “make sure you have purchased that article first, or this won't make much sense to you!” True, WfB2 uses Victory Points – and doesn’t mention how they work here, clearly expecting you to already understand the concept – but that’s all that this product carries over from its predecessor; everything else here revolves around new mechanics.

Said new mechanics dive directly into the territory that the previous article dodged: the simulation of entire armies clashing. To the product’s credit, its system is simple and easy, but that comes with all of the critiques that go along with that simplicity.

Warfare for Beginners 2 holds to the idea that the PCs don’t simply await for opportunities to arise, but rather are military commanders who decide upon what tactics to have the troops perform, while the enemy responds in kind. In this regard, the book presents eight kinds of military tactics (e.g. ambush, artillery, etc.) with a sidebar briefly overviewing each one.

You can likely guess how things work from there. The PCs and the GM each pick a tactic, and then compare their results to a table on the article’s first page. Depending on the particular combination of tactic-versus-tactic, the PCs can either gain or lose Victory Points (or, in fact, things can be a wash, with the PCs neither gaining nor losing any VPs. This, however, was slightly obfuscated by the table presentation, which presented such results as simply blank squares, rather than a more-helpful “+0”).

Depending on what sort of mass combat rules you prefer, this simplicity is either making you despair or making you cheer. Regardless, it should be noted that the book does throw some wrinkles into the above process. First of all, the PCs can attempt (via a skill check) to ascertain what tactic their enemy will use (though curiously, the GM doesn’t seem to get to attempt the same). Secondly, both sides can attempt an opposed skill check to increase the efficacy of their chosen tactic – success means that the number of VPs gained or lost is increased by 1.

While that’s the sum total of the new mechanics, it is heartening that (also like the previous work in this series) WfB2 does take the time to talk about putting this into a narrative context. For example, it encourages you to put individual faces on the enemy leaders making the opposed skill checks, for example, which is a small but salient detail. Likewise, it talks about the need to dress up the simple comparison of tactics and the ensuing change in Victory Points into something that’s much more exciting.

Following this is a quick note that the scale of Victory Points – that is, the total number necessary to win or lose the battle – is increased under this system.

Unfortunately, the above is the only oblique mention that this article mentions regarding how to use this system in conjunction with the one from the original Warfare for Beginners. In fact, the use of Victory Points is the only thing linking these two products at all – notwithstanding that, you have two separate ways of having the PCs play in a military conflict. That’s a shame, because given the separate foci of these articles (one being commando raids by the PCs, the other being the large-scale movements of troops), they could have been very complementary. They still can be, but it would have helped to address issues that come up when using both systems together. For example, do the PCs need to personally lead their soldiers, or can they issue orders and then go carry out their own mission? Can they launch a small raid that affects the enemy’s use of tactics that day? More could have been done here.

As it is, this book’s system of mass battles is intuitive, but limited. It allows for quick and easy resolution to combat engagements, and even allows for some nuance with its system of opposed skill checks, but it still neglects a lot. There’s no way to incorporate terrain into this system, for example, and issues with more than two units going into battle isn’t discussed, nor is the size of the respective armies, nor their composition (e.g. one is undead, another has cavalry, etc.), though the book’s last paragraph promises that this will be covered in the next in the series.

Wait…the “next in the series”?

I went into Warfare for Beginners 2 under the presumption that it was an afterthought to the original rules, released too late to incorporate into its predecessor – why else would you release a two-page “sequel” that requires the use of the preceding materials after just sixteen days? It was only with the aforementioned promise of new material later that I realized that this was done on purpose, something that rubs me the wrong way.

The problem with Warfare for Beginners 2 is that it sits awkwardly between being its own product and being an adjunct to the original Warfare for Beginners (and subsequent WfB articles). Had the Victory Points information been entirely reprinted, this material could have stood on its own (minus any future products that build on the rules here). Had it gone out of its way to tie itself tighter to the previous product, it probably should have been merged with it into a single book, rather than strung out across a very thin series. As it is, we’re seeing two different ideas presented as part of the same material and THEN divided back into two different pay-for products.

Make no mistake, the mass battle rules presented here are serviceable, but could be much more than they are. For that, however, you’ll need to wait for the release of the next few pages to what’s essentially one book.

Mass combat has never been handled very well in any incarnation of the d20 System, and Pathfinder is no exception. From large and intricate systems that are practically a separate game in-and-of themselves to highly abstract rules-light methods, mass combat has been presented in many different varieties. Unfortunately, all of them are imperfect, tending to be either too complex or too simplistic. Ultimately, a fresh approach to the entire idea is what’s needed.

That fresh approach is found in EN Publishing’s Warfare for Beginners.

A four-page PDF (one page of which is the OGL), Warfare for Beginners throws out the underlying assumption of all other mass battle systems: that you need stats for armies. Instead, it puts the focus squarely on the PCs as individuals and makes them the linchpin for how a mass battle resolves. As the book’s product page says: the underlying assumption is that unless the PCs do something, their side will eventually lose.

It’s certainly possible to take issue with the aforementioned assumption. After all, some may not like the idea that the PCs are ALWAYS on the losing side of a battle unless they go out of their way to turn it around – while the book doesn’t address this, I think it’s important to understand that this underlying default is a purely meta-game construct. It’s designed to set up the system that Warfare for Beginners presents, rather than create an in-character scenario of “why is it our side is always composed of bunglers except for us?”

Warfare for Beginners was originally a 3.5 product that has been converted over to Pathfinder. This is fairly easy to see, since its main mechanic is an original one. The battle is decided by the accumulation of Victory Points. Gather enough VPs and the PCs’ side wins; lose all their VPs and their side loses, plain and simple.

The kicker is that VPs are naturally lost over time…as in, every day of the battle. The PCs must accumulate enough VPs by undertaking missions to bolster their troops and undermine the enemy to be able to win. A d20-based table is presented with various mission ideas, as well as how many VPs they’re worth if completed, and the penalty to VPs if failed. An accompanying table determines events that take place with the rest of the armies, and the resulting changes to the VP totals.

What all of this means in a practical context – and what the book spends about half of its pages talking about – is that Warfare for Beginners doesn’t so much present a system for resolving mass battles as it gives you a series of ideas for encounters that the PCs face over the course of the battles. In other words, if you use this system to determine that the can PCs go out on an assassination mission, you’ll still need to use a battle map, have NPC stats for foes, etc. You’re essentially running short adventures for the PCs, and keeping a tally of how they do.

There are some guidelines given on how challenging missions should be based on how many Victory Points they’re worth, as well as discussion of scaling various aspects of the system (e.g. having things occur over months instead of days). Roughly the last quarter of the book presents some examples of how this would work in actual play around the game table.

Needless to say, how much you get out of this system will depend on what you had in mind for your Pathfinder mass battles. If you want your PCs commanding armies and using large-scale military tactics, then this book isn’t for you. If you want your PCs to be pulling off daring commando raids whose effects change the whole dynamic of the battle, then this product gives you an excellent system for designing short (or even not-so-short) adventures to do just that.

What really makes the difference here is the book’s presentation. While it may be obvious to a lot of GM’s, I give this book kudos for saying “don’t just dryly read off the table results! Present what get from these rolls as natural consequences of the battle! Here’s an example.” This is the sort of advice that’s often overlooked simply because a lot of people just assume this sort of presentation is understood. That’s not the case, however, and dressing up what the mechanics give you is a big part of role-playing, particularly for this book, which is giving you outlines for adventuring during a war.

If you want your PCs to be the ones who make the difference, pick up Warfare for Beginners. It makes them the real heroes of battle.

Unfortunately, my review is too long for Paizo's space limits. Please check the discussion thread for my full review.

There’s something to be said for doing something truly epic in your game. I don’t mean in the sense of getting more than 20 levels (though that’s certainly impressive), but rather those actions that are above and beyond the usual course of game-play. Killing an enemy and healing your wounded ally is par for the course; leaping onto the flying enemy mage from the top of the tower, slashing his throat, and riding his magically-flying corpse to the ground just in time to heal your dying companion is epic. It’s with that sort of thought in mind that we have Achievement Feats: Volume 2.

It needs to be noted that the “volume 2” here is a misnomer. This book is unrelated to the previous Achievement Feats. Instead, this is a different take on the same idea. Whereas the first Achievement Feats book was based around the Xbox-style achievements where you do enough of something to get a special reward, this book takes a different tack; as stated above, it’s about doing something truly impressive.

The book tells us that each PC has a single “achievement slot.” This means that you can only ever have one achievement feat (which is gained automatically when you meet the prerequisite) – if you later qualify for another achievement, you have to choose between the new one and the one you have, and if you trade your old one in, you lose all its benefits. You can gain a second achievement slot (via a new feat, or an alternate human racial trait), but you can never have more than two.

As for the achievement feats themselves, over thirty are present here. While some of these have prerequisites that don’t seem too over the top (e.g. spend all of your skill points on one skill when you gain a level), most of them range from “damn, that’d be tough to do” to “are you freaking KIDDING me?!” Seriously, there are achievement feats here for taking control of a major world religion, slaying the ruler of Hell or a similar plane, or killing everything in an entire plane of existence.

Yeah, you read that right. Killing everyone on an entire plane of existence.

Now, pound-for-pound, the benefits you get from an achievement feat are quite a bit stronger than what you’d get for taking a normal feat. But given the prerequisites mentioned above, I’m almost tempted to think they sound positively miniscule in comparison to what you have to do. Still, these are pretty hefty bonuses. Take control of a major world religion, for example, you get free Knowledge (religion) ranks, free extra spells, and can never lose class abilities due to personal conduct. Not too shabby.

The book ends with a surprising, and surprisingly-helpful, section discussing making up new achievement feats. It divides such activities into ad hoc feats (made up to suit something epic) and pre-made feats (made ahead of time for something epic that you think the PCs will do). It also talks about if you should let the PCs know ahead of time what these feats are and how to get them – there’s pros and cons either way, making it interesting to consider.

Ultimately, this book’s takes on feats of achievement is that less is more; it’s not about how often you do something, but about how epic a stunt you pull off. And that’s something I can absolutely respect; if your PC accomplishes something uber-impressive, why not give them a powerful reward for being just that awesome? If you want your characters’ achievements to have a tangible impact on what their character can do, pick up Achievement Feats Volume 2.

One of the best things to come out of the d20 rules is, in my opinion, templates. Being easy ways of customizing your monsters helps to make what would otherwise be generic creatures have a special, unexpected slant to them. Of course, saying templates are “easy” ways of customizing your monsters is a relative term. In fact, templates virtually always require tweaking a monster beforehand. Hence why Pathfinder offered us the new simple templates, micro-templates that made comparatively small changes, complete with “quick” rules that told us how to change a monster on-the-fly.

Rite Publishing’s second book of templates goes with this approach, trying to keep the new material in line with existing simple templates…but not everything herein is quite so simple, as the title acknowledges: 101 Not So Simple Monster Templates.

The title’s honesty is slightly undercut by the fact that this book doesn’t actually have one-hundred-one templates in it, but rather ninety-three. You wouldn’t know it unless you actually counted, though, so it’s not like that’s a deal-breaker.

The templates themselves run quite the gamut in what they offer. Some of these templates are indeed worthy of being called simple, such as templates for creatures that are blind, deaf, or missing an arm. Others are based around turning the base creature into another creature-type, such as the Banshee Creature template, or the Lich-Touched template (which gives the base creature the lich’s paralyzing touch).

Some may find the aforementioned templates to be something of a deal-breaker, as these seem like something easily constructed on your own. That may be, but that’s not the fault of the book – after all, this is focused on simple templates, and that will mean that many of the templates take a single idea and implement it. That the book exhibits a range in the templates it offers is a virtue, not a vice.

Speaking of a range, there are plenty of templates in here that aren’t quite so simple, either. The Walking Fortress Creature template makes the creature into a titanic monstrosity with an actual fortress on its back. A Riven Magic Creature not only shrugs off magic, but drains and destroys it as well. There’s a lot here for those looking to put an unexpected spin on their everyday monster. Most helpful is the chart at the end of the book that ranks the templates by their CR adjustment, ranging from -5 all the way to +4.

The book doesn’t offer any example creatures, and in only a few places are there sidebars that discuss what’s presented. Likewise, while the lion’s share of the templates offer both quick and rebuild rules, not all of them do. In many cases, this is because the template is effect-based, and so the quick and rebuild rules are identical. Sometimes, though, the template just offers one or the other. Again, that isn’t particularly bad, but keep an eye out for the templates that assume that you’ll make things like ability score adjustments ahead of time.

Ultimately, this book is overflowing with templates that are simple and not-so-simple. In fact, some of these are templates of such creativity that they could have gotten the full template treatment. Whether you want your monster to have an exceptionally powerful bite attack (Gnawing Creature) or be the personification of death itself (Grim Reaper Creature), look no further than 101 Not So Simple Templates.

Like a lot of Pathfinder players and GMs out there, I enjoy using hero points (from the APG). They offer a wide variety of ways in which to tweak a die roll or action to give things that more cinematic feeling. Hence, I was left scratching my head when I saw 4th Dimension Games’s sourcebook Fate Points and Aspects for d20. Reading through the book, however, quickly dispelled my confusion, and left me feeling rather surprised at just how limited hero points are compared to what’s in here.

A twenty-five page PDF, Fate Points and Aspects for d20 takes its inspiration (as some of you may have guessed) from the FATE RPG. This isn’t any sort of attempt at a conversion of that system, per se, but rather adapts one of its signature mechanics for use in any d20 game (this isn’t to say the book isn’t Pathfinder-specific – rather, what’s here works equally well in 3.5 as it does in Pathfinder; no conversion necessary).

On the surface, Fate Points are exceptionally similar to hero points; the actual listings of what they can do vary slightly, but that’s mostly a semantic distinction. What makes such a world of difference are the titular aspects that this book presents. Aspects are short descriptors for characters, though they can also be used for scenes or even entire adventures or campaigns. “Money-grubbing professional duelist” would be an aspect for a greedy rogue character, for example.

The key here is that fate points aren’t gained or spent in a vacuum; their use must be tied to an aspect in some way. For example, player of the money-grubbing professional duelist who wanted to re-roll an attack roll would do so by justifying that his character – currently using a rapier in a one-on-one fight with an orc – was a professional that wouldn’t have missed. Hence, he could spend a fate point for a re-roll. Likewise, you gain fate points by the GM using an aspect against you. If the GM ruled that the money-grubbing duelist couldn’t turn down an adventure hook wherein he was promised a small fortune if he undertook the adventure, the player would gain a fate point.

Of course, all of this is the absolute tip of the iceberg. The book goes into exquisite detail about different ways to use aspects in your game. For example, it’s entirely possible to use not only a scene’s aspect to your advantage, but to use an NPCs aspects against them. That’s assuming you can figure out what their aspects even are (something that can be done two different ways). It’s possible to use “maneuvers” to create temporary aspects that you can then use to your advantage (or someone else’s disadvantage).

The book takes no part of this topic half-heartedly. Pages are given to topics such as generating useful aspects, the different types of aspects, and how to GM when using fate points and aspects in your game. It helps that the book is also peppered with examples of using these rules in play, as well as helpful sidebars that talk about related issues.

There are some minor issues with the book that, while not bad, could have been better. For example, I wish that some wider uses for fate points had been given. As it is, they’re pretty much hero points with another name (and a few small tweaks, like not being able to spend 2 points to cheat death). It seems odd – though not bad – that so much space is given to the roleplaying hook provided by aspects when the payoff for using them, fate points, are comparatively limited. The uses for these are obvious, and useful, but compared to what’s in the rest of the book they don’t seem as inspired.

Also, the book tends to be slightly keyword-happy. Using an aspect to help yourself is Invoking (capital “I”), whereas using them to hamper someone else is Compelling. Aspects can also be Tagged, situations involving aspects can be Escalated, finding existing aspects requires Assessment, and I already mentioned Maneuvers. These are just a few of the terms that come up throughout the book, and at some points you start to have trouble juggling them all. I can understand wanting to create shorthand, but this had a long list of shorthand terms.

Of course, these are all minor complaints, which collectively amount to “I wish this book had even more awesome than it already does!” The APG introduced hero points as a mechanic for greater role-playing utility, but it wasn’t until I read this book that I felt like that promise had been actualized. Both hero points and fate points let you swing the odds to your character’s favor, but only the ones found in Fate Points and Aspects for d20 actually help to make it feel like you’re role-playing a hero.

It’s a time-honored tradition in role-playing games that we convert things we like from other media into game stats. Sometimes these conversions are literal recreations of a given monster, magic item, spell, etc., while at other times they’re “inspired by” the source material. Of course, sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference, particularly if you’re not familiar with the source material to begin with. That was sort of how I felt when I read through Demiurge Press’s newest monster book, Creature Codex Volume 3: It Came From the Silver Screen.

This book is a short one, being eleven pages long, with one page each for the cover, credits, and OGL. All of the monsters thusly take up one page, save for the crawling terror, which has two (the better to show the tools it uses; more on that below). There is a table of contents, but it lacks hyperlinks; nor are there any bookmarks. That’s not really an indictment in a book that has less than a dozen pages, but it would have been nice nonetheless.

I was quite pleased to see that CC3 came with a printer-friendly version, something that seems to get ignored all too often in this era of smart phones and tablets (by the way, there aren’t any smart phone or tablet-specific viewing options – boo). I was a little less impressed to see that this simply consisted of all of the artwork being set into grayscale, however. To me, something truly printer-friendly removes all of the artwork (which often means redoing the layout). Still, it’s better than nothing.

Speaking of the artwork, each of the interior pieces is a full-color illustration by Heather Frazier. I was a little surprised that only a single artist worked on the book, given that the quality of the pictures seemed to vary quite a bit. Some, like the dire rabbit or the beach horror, are quite good. Others aren’t bad, but don’t seem to hit the same level, and one (the molekin) seems like it needed one more pass. Still, there’s nothing here that I would call bad, and I do have to compliment Demiurge Press on having a picture for each monster, something that’s very important in a monster book.

So, what are the monsters themselves like? Let’s take a closer look at these horrors.

I should say upfront that I didn’t recognize the inspirations for most of these. The author’s foreword notes that these are inspired by the classic monster movies of the 1950’s through the 70’s…which is probably why I couldn’t place the inspiration on the bulk of them. I like movies, horror included, but I don’t usually watch movies before my time, which these most assuredly were. Only the molekin is familiar to me, mostly since I’ve seen plenty of pastiches about “mole-men” to get the joke. Likely, these others are all from classic monster movies that haven’t managed to linger in the public consciousness quite so well.

The first monster is the alchemical mutant template, with a dire bear as the example creature. I have to admit that I wasn’t too impressed with what this particular template brought to the table. Besides some fairly jejune stat changes (e.g. increase one size category) there wasn’t much here. The only unique power was a fairly background change, and could be superfluous in some creatures depending on their saving throw values. While a monster’s value comes as much from its presentation at the game table as it does from its stats, the stats should still present utility to bolster its presentation, and that’s lacking here.

The beach horror, a monster rather than a template, does a much better job of presenting a memorable monster via mechanical innovation (though, as I mentioned above, the artwork helps a lot). Literally a conglomeration of sea life aggregated by the forces of evil, these things are quite dangerous to mid-level adventurers. It has a weakness, but rather interestingly it’s one of the last things most characters (or players) would ever think of.

The crawling terror is the big-bad of the book, and the only monster to have a double-digit Challenge Rating. Despite being tentacular horrors from another world come to dominate the local life forms, the gurbortl (as they call themselves) don’t come off as a mind flayer-knockoff. I credit this to their unusual way of disguising themselves (which is also an interesting method of attacking and defending), in addition to the new magic items presented with them. This monster, more than any of the others in the book, really evokes the feel of a horror movie.

The dire rabbit was, I admit, a bit of a head-scratcher. It’s a solid enough creature, I just couldn’t understand its inclusion in a book of horror movie-inspired monsters. Maybe this is an example of the kitschy quality of older horror movies? Either way, it’s rather odd to have animal companion stats for creatures in a book like this. Not that I don’t like the idea – I can just see a brigade of halfling warriors mounted on combat-trained dire bunnies (the artwork even shows a halfling next to a saddled dire bunny). It’s a very fun monster, hence the oddity.

The dire shrew evoked a similar feeling, but less so. This monster is presented as being little more than a big rat, which is basically what it is, albeit with poison. The next notes that dire shrews are pack hunters who let their venom wear down their enemies, which I think is probably the most effective way to use these creatures. Again, animal companion stats were included (which is a bonus, not a complaint).

The molekin, as I noted above, were the only monster whose cinematic ancestor I recognized. The portrayal of these creatures was different from what I was expecting though. Far from being some sort of savage degenerates, the molekin are a neutral race that dwells underground, domesticating giant lizards and generally adopting an independent, isolationist society. Information is given on their gestalt deity, which I was quite taken with and wish had received a longer entry. Perhaps there’ll be a short supplement on PC molekin in the future?

The final entry saves the best for last, because it’s here we’re given a template for an undead flying head. And if that doesn’t bring a smile to your face, then I question your gamer cred. Now, it’s true that Paizo had flying undead heads a few months back (Pathfinder #43), but this monster is completely different for two reasons. The first is that it’s a template whereas those were individual monsters. The second is that this head actually keeps its intelligence and gains several special powers, while Paizo’s were basically zombies in a different form.

Needless to say, I absolutely loved everything about this last monster. The new powers given to undying heads (the name of the template) were a suite that allowed for customization (like the special powers of a ghost). Further, one of the inherent powers that all undying heads got made sure that their spellcasting powers were preserved and sustained, despite their bodiless condition. There was one spot where there was clearly a small typo (the defensive abilities line calls them alchemical mutants, from the first template in the book) but that’s not really a strike against the template as a whole, since that’s not a mechanical error.

Overall, Creature Codex Volume 3 is one of those books where the utility depends on how you look at it. If you expect that the monsters here will all be closely married to their inspirations – that is, that these are monsters that will inspire horror – then you’ll likely consider this book to be a thoroughly mixed bag. On the other hand, if you allow for these creatures to have a more general application, you’ll probably enjoy what’s here a lot more. After all, “dead head” sorcerers and monsters made out of glued-together sea creatures are here right next to peaceful mole-people and giant bunnies. I took the latter approach and was quite happy with almost all of the monsters here (though I just couldn’t warm up to the alchemical mutant).

Some of the these monsters will frighten your PCs, and some will puzzle them, but if It Came From the Silver Screen, then it’s a monster that will definitely surprise them.

Once a traditional part of the game, lately it seems like red herrings have gone the way of random encounters. Oh they’re still there, but they’re so de-emphasized that you can easily miss them if you’re not paying close attention. Most adventures seem content to lead the PCs along the course they’re supposed to be on; side-treks only occur if things go off the rails somehow (or they’re built-into the adventure).

It is, I think, something of a lost art that the PCs will get themselves into scrapes that don’t necessarily have to do with their current quest. More than just random combat encounters, there are times when people who don’t otherwise have anything to do with the PCs will become entangled with them, including thugs, thieves, and con artists. And all three are found in Unforgettable Encounters: Con Job at the Broken Jug, by 4th Dimension Games.

A 14-page supplement for the Pathfinder RPG, the Con Job at the Broken Jug’s title succinctly wraps up the nature of this short set-piece encounter. The PCs, at some point when they’re putting the word out that they’re looking for information, come to the attention of a pair of con artists. One of them, a beautiful woman, pretends to play the coquettish information broker, while the other plays her jealous husband.

If the scenario sounds simple, rest assured that the product itself is anything but. 4th Dimension Games made sure to cover every angle, and there’s a surprisingly deep amount of information here. The Broken Jug tavern is discussed and detailed to a surprisingly degree, including a full color map of the interior. The bartender is covered, as are the usual patrons (and their reactions to seeing the con job go down). The book covers what if the PCs make Diplomacy checks to learn about the supposed information broker, and the thieves’ backgrounds and motivations.

It’s noteworthy that the tavern setting is more than just a backdrop. This particular tavern serves its own type of alcohol, Axegrinder Blue, with a sidebar covering the effects of getting drunk. This is actually quite important to the scenario, as the enticing Allaine tries to make sure that the PC she’s talking to (guilefully maneuvering things so that she’s only talking to one person) gets drink while she flirts with him. Worry not about the rest of the party, though, as the book also covers what activities the other PCs can be up to as they’re waiting.

What a lot of people will notice is that the rules for the checks the PCs have to make during the actual con is that the checks aren’t static, nor directly based on the NPCs’ stats. Instead, the DCs are all based directly on the Average Party Level. This built-in scaling makes the encounter suitable for PCs of any level (though there’s a sidebar about what to do if the PCs are high enough level to have magic that can affect the situation). While some people might not like that the difficulty is set no matter how proficient the PCs are, this guarantees that the challenge will remain no matter how much the party has leveled up. It’s a simple and easy way to make sure that the encounter is as hard as it was written to be.

In regards to that, it should be reiterated that the nature of this encounter isn’t combat. Certainly, the threat of violence is part of the encounter, when the supposed jealous husband enters (and once again, there’s a helpful sidebar to cover the fact that his loaded crossbow may not intimidate higher-level PCs). But far and away the real challenge here is skill-based. There are multiple skill checks to notice the con, either directly or indirectly, and these are where the PCs need to excel if they don’t want to be dupes.

The product is quite enjoyable to read, as the pages are set on a cream-colored background, and several interior illustrations (mostly of the major NPCs) pop up throughout. Full bookmarks are present, and copy-and-paste is fully enabled.

Of course, no book is flawless, and that’s true for this one as well. The major problem with Con Job at the Broken Jug isn’t anything that’s found in its pages, but rather what’s not there. Specifically, there’s no mention of how much XP the PCs gain. Given that this isn’t supposed to be a combat encounter as much as a skill-based one, there’s no good way to judge what the XP award should be (particularly since the NPCs don’t even have XP listings, a staple of Pathfinder stat blocks). This is an oversight that hopefully will be corrected in an update.

I should mention that I also would have appreciated more information on what to do if you need to make a follow-up to this encounter. That is, what if the PCs go seeking the thieves out, either for revenge or because they need to retrieve a stolen item? To be fair, this is beyond the scope of the book, but a few paragraphs on what could come next would have been helpful. Still, it’s not a major loss.

Overall, Con Job at the Broken Jug is an incredibly detailed side trek for your PCs, and its nature as a setup means that it can be plugged in to virtually any campaign. Every angle is covered for how it can go down, and the challenge is surprisingly deep, presenting a “threat” that’s neither violent nor even truly malign. These are simply conmen who’ve practiced this ruse enough that it’s a well-oiled machine now. The intricacies presented here will surprise you, and will surprise your party even more. Make for an Unforgettable Encounter with the Con Job at the Broken Jug.

Unfortunately, my review is far too long to fit into the space provided here. Check the discussion thread to find it.